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Isabella Isherwood
Member Since: 2020 | Location: Chicago | Page Views: 787 
About Me
Isabella Isherwood is a Chicago jazz vocalist, pianist, recording artist, and actor whose music moves easily between the Great American Songbook and material far outside its traditional borders. A lifelong pianist with an actor’s attention to language and character, Isherwood approaches a song as something to investigate from the inside: finding its point of view, making it personal, and allowing an audience to encounter familiar material anew. That approach is at the center of her debut album, The Sweetest Sounds, produced by acclaimed pianist and vocalist Champian Fulton and released on Sabrina Records in April 2026. Recorded in Chicago with guitarist Mike Allemana, bassist Joe Policastro, and drummer Alejandro Salazar, the album places Isherwood’s voice and piano within a repertoire that stretches from Rodgers and Hart, Johnny Mercer, and Thelonious Monk to Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse. Rather than treating those choices as departures from the jazz tradition, Isherwood uses them to explore what has always interested her most about the form: interpretation, improvisation, and the possibilities hidden inside a great song. The album has earned international critical attention and radio airplay. Critic Neil Tesser praised the range of Isherwood’s voice, from its “thrilling low notes” to a middle register that “resonates warmth,” ultimately describing her unadorned singing as a voice that “cuts the fog like a quavering beacon.” Jersey Jazz praised her understanding of lyric and her ability to present a song, while JW Vibe described her as “deeply attuned to the storytelling heart of jazz tradition.” For Isherwood, that tradition is also personal. She is the granddaughter of Jerry Libby, the longtime Detroit-area jazz pianist, performer, and club owner who founded the independent Sabrina Records in 1964. Isherwood grew up surrounded by the music he loved and the records he collected, and Libby remains a major influence on both her musicianship and her understanding of what it means to build a life in jazz. She began studying classical piano at four, but jazz was part of the language of her family long before she began developing a professional identity of her own. With The Sweetest Sounds, Isherwood brought Sabrina Records into a new generation; even the album’s catalog number, 063, honors Libby’s June 3 birthday. Isherwood began performing professionally in Chicago clubs and concert venues as a teenager. At 16, she appeared with her quartet at the 40th Annual Chicago Jazz Festival and returned to the festival two years later with the Isabella Isherwood Trio. She has since continued to appear at the festival, including a 2024 performance with the Isabella Isherwood Quintet, while building a regular presence in Chicago’s jazz clubs as a vocalist, pianist, and bandleader. Her performance history reaches well beyond the club circuit. Isherwood has performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Center and Ravinia, toured Europe three times, appeared at the Elkhart Jazz Festival, and performed at Chicago venues including Jazz Showcase, Winter’s Jazz Club, Andy’s Jazz Club, Epiphany Center for the Arts, and Harris Theater. She has also played for and alongside artists including Cyrille Aimée, Emmet Cohen, Ulysses Owens Jr., Dave Stryker, and Rufus Reid. In 2026, following the release of The Sweetest Sounds, Isherwood returned to Jazz Showcase for a series of headlining engagements with the Isabella Isherwood Quartet. In September, she traveled to Fayetteville, Arkansas, for a sold-out headlining performance at Walton Arts Center, opening the venue’s new Songbook Salon series, curated by Champian Fulton. Her program, From Cole Porter to Bob Dylan, offered a particularly clear picture of the artist Isherwood is becoming: rooted in jazz without being confined by repertoire, moving from standards to musical theatre and contemporary song according to what the material has to say rather than what category it belongs in. That breadth owes something to Isherwood’s parallel career as an actor. She works professionally in theatre, film, and television, and her acting informs the way she sings without turning a song into a theatrical exercise. Lyrics have circumstances. A phrase can change its meaning halfway through. Humor and heartbreak can occupy the same eight bars. Her repertoire consequently reaches beyond jazz standards to deep cuts from musical theatre and songs by writers and artists including Tom Waits, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, and Amy Winehouse. Isherwood is an alumna of the Jazz Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra’s Jazz Orchestra, with additional studies at the Chicago College of Performing Arts and Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. She is also a member of the Chicago Federation of Musicians. Now performing regularly with the Isabella Isherwood Quartet, she is building on The Sweetest Sounds with a body of live work that reflects both where she comes from and where she intends to take the music next. For Isherwood, the thread running from Jerry Libby and Sabrina Records through the jazz clubs of Chicago to her own recordings and concerts is not about preserving a tradition unchanged. It is about knowing that tradition well enough to make something personal from it.
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This page was last updated on 2026-09-30.
