Results for "Vocalist"

Elizabeth Kontomanou

Of Greek and African origin, and born in France, Elisabeth Kontomanou has worked with many musicians in both Europe and America, including Sam Newsome, Leon Parker, Michel Legrand, Mike Stern, Alain Jean-Marie. She first gained recognition at the ‘Concours de La Défense’ and has since been nominated for a Django d’Or Award, following her album ‘Embrace’ released on Steeple Chase in 1999. Acclaimed by the critics for her two latest recordings, she was awarded the ‘Vocal Jazz Award’ of the Victoires du Jazz in 2006. Since then, prefering an intimate style to an extrovert one, and depth to superficial effects, she has performed widely in the most prestigious venues across many continents, such as the Blue Note, the Knitting Factory and the Supper Club

Lenora Zenzalai Helm

Born: August 15, 1961

Throughout her 40+-year span of musical achievements as a Jazz Vocal Musician specializing in Classic, Traditional standard jazz, Lenora (Zenzalai) Helm Hammonds has toured, recorded, and performed with her various groups, on international jazz stages, venues and festivals, as well as featured guest artist with renowned jazz icons. Her career as a vocal musician has encompassed time as a lyricist, guest artist, background singer, composer, and educator at North Carolina Central University. Dr. Lenora Z. Helm Hammonds is a Chicago IL native, Former U.S. Jazz Ambassador two-time Fulbright Senior Music Specialist, and a tenured, Associate Professor in the Department of Music and Jazz Studies Program at North Carolina Central University (NCCU).  She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in vocal jazz performance, jazz ear training, jazz pedagogy and songwriting, Director of NCCU Vocal Jazz Ensemble (NCCU’s Vocal Jazz Ensemble received the Best Choir 2018-19 award from HBCU Digest), and has authored several academic and student initiatives, including the planning, design, and coordination of an NEA-sponsored Teaching Artist Certificate program. Academic award highlights include a Duke University-NCCU John Hope Franklin Digital Humanities Fellowship, 2018 Javett Music Award International Jazz Scholar at University of Pretoria, South Africa, a 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from Marquis Publishing, NCCU’s Excellence in Teaching Award, and receiving the highest faculty honor, the 2021 University of North Carolina Board of Governors Excellence in Teaching Award. Lenora’s dream for creating access to under-served global populations interested in vocal jazz education was realized in the creation of a library of online vocal training programs at www.LenoraHelm.online. Her research interests are at the intersection of digital humanities, intercultural competence, and Jazz, and is a published author with Routledge, Taylor & Francis, and Springer.A 2018 inaugural Javett International Scholar in Jazz for University of Pretoria, during her time as a musician, Helm Hammonds has earned recognition as: a quarter-finalist for the GRAMMY Music Educator of the Year Award, a Salzburg Global Citizenship Fellow, a UNC Global Educator Fellow, a Fulbright Senior Music Specialist, and the former US Jazz Ambassador under the State Department and Kennedy Center. Leadership roles in jazz include, Vice President, Area Unit Leadership, North Carolina, for Jazz Education Network (JEN). Additionally, she is a member of the esteemed Jazz Vocal Advisory Board for Juilliard Jazz, Juilliard, NYC, and is vocal jazz faculty during summers for Brevard Jazz Institute, Brevard, NC.

Mary Ann Redmond

Born: November 3, 1959

I’m from Richmond VA where at 15 I got to sing with my two brother’s top 40 band for a few years before heading off to college. I studied as a voice major at VCU for a year operatically and got to be in the 4th jazz band. Not a ringing endorsement, but nonetheless, it was a great school. I’ve been in bands ever since covering all kinds of music and writing my songs as well. As for five years from now, I hope to be playing, singing teaching and doing what I love. A couple years back, I was lucky enough to meet Paul Langosch and Jay Cooley and they took me under their musical wing that steered us in more of a jazz/blues direction. The Redmond, Langosch and Cooley Trio came together out of a love for the “Great American Songbook”; a living trust of the creative genius of composers both with us and departed

Teri Roiger

Born: January 27

Teri Roiger has been making music all her life (since age 5!) and over the years her music has taken many exciting twists and turns. Teri is a jazz vocalist, but also plays piano, composes music and writes lyrics. She has been sharing her knowledge and inspiration with her many students at SUNY New Paltz for several years. The depth of her experiences and love of jazz is apparent when she brings all of her talents to a live performance, the recording studio, and in her compositions. Her latest recording, her most personal and powerful to date, was released by Dot Time Records in 2017, and is her fourth release as a bandleader – GHOST OF YESTERDAY: Shades of Lady Day — a heartfelt tribute to Billie Holiday, to coincide with Lady Day's 102nd birth year

Pamela Hart

Pamela Hart is highly regarded as Austin, Texas’ finest jazz vocalist. Noted by Austin Women’s Magazine as “Austin’s First Lady of Jazz,” audiences rave about Pamela’s excellent pitch, clarity and soothing vocal quality. “Her warm, clear tones and meticulously controlled pitch carry an illusion of effortlessness”—Tribeza Magazine. Her sultry rendition of classic jazz standards and contemporary music wins immediate acceptance by any audience. Born in Los Angeles, California, Pamela moved to Austin, Texas in 1982. In addition to regular appearances at Austin clubs, restaurants, live music broadcasts, weddings, banquets/parties and festivals, Pamela and her husband Kevin Hart have produced (and she has performed in) the semi-annual Women in Jazz Concert Series—the greatest events for female jazz musicians in Texas—1994 through 2017

Shirley Bassey

Mariza

In less than twelve years, Mariza has risen from a well hidden local phenomenon, known only to a small circle of admirers in Lisbon, to one of the most widely acclaimed stars of the World Music circuit. Fado em mim Album It all started with her first CD, Fado em Mim, published in 2001, which quickly led to a number of highly successful international presentations - the Québec Summer Festival, in which she received the event’s First Award (Most Outstanding Performance), New York’s Central Park, the Hollywood Bowl, the Royal Festival Hall, the Womad Festival - and ultimately earned her BBC Radio 3’s award for Best European Artist in the area of World Music

Brook Benton

Born: September 19, 1931

Brook Benton was one of the most popular recording artists in late 1950s and early 1960s, scoring over 50 hits on the Billboard charts, and collecting 18 certified gold records. He was also a prolific songwriter having penned songs that have become standards, as “It's Just a Matter of Time" and "Endlessly." Benjamin Franklin Peay was born in Camden, South Carolina, on September 19, 1931. Benton sang in his church as a child, and continued with gospel music into his teens. By age seventeen, Benton left for New York City to try his luck in the popular music business, and began singing on demo tapes for aspiring songwriters peddling their songs

Youssou N'Dour

Born: 1959

Born in Dakar in 1959, N'Dour is a singer endowed with remarkable range and poise, and, as a composer, bandleader, and producer, with a prodigious musical intelligence. The New York Times has described his voice as “an arresting tenor, deployed with prophetic authority,” one that “soars heavenward with passion and then wafts tenderly toward earth.” As a craftsman of an inimitable brand of ensemble music, N'Dour absorbs the entire diversity of the Senegalese musical spectrum in his work, often filtering his country’s musical heritage through a modernist lens of genre-defying rock or pop music from outside Senegalese culture. Named “African Artist of the Century” by the English publication fRoots at the threshold of the year 2000, and to the “TIME 100” in 2007, TIME magazine’s annual list of “the hundred men and women whose power, talent, or moral example is transforming the world," N'Dour has made mbalax famous throughout the world during nearly 30 years of recording and touring outside of Senegal with his band, the Super Étoile. National Public Radio and Rolling Stone contributor Robert Christgau, the dean of American rock music critics, has consistently clamored for an ever-wider recognition of N’Dour’s gifts, variously calling N'Dour “the world's greatest pop vocalist” and, most recently, “the world's most consistent record maker this decade.” He has written that N’Dour is “the one African moving inexorably toward the world-pop fusion everyone else theorizes about.” Peter Gabriel, whose duet with N'Dour on a song called “In Your Eyes” on Gabriel's album So (Virgin/Geffen, 1985) defined a truly memorable moment in the history of rock, has proclaimed N'Dour, as a singer, simply “one of the best alive.” N'Dour solidified his leadership of the Super Étoile by 1979, having retained the essential personnel from earlier incarnations of the group, and he soon thereafter launched an international career with the help of a Senegalese taxi drivers' fraternal association in France and a small circle of supporters in England. The beginnings in Dakar had been less auspicious

Dwight Trible

Legendary LA jazz singer Dwight Trible is a firm favourite of all at Gondwana. He first came to international renown with his 2005 Ninja Tune release Love Is the Answer and his deeply soulful voice has seen him compared to Leon Thomas and Andy Bey. Trible has worked with the likes of Pharoah Sanders, Horace Tapscott and Kamasi Washington (he sings lead vocals on the Epic) and brings a deep-rooted soulfulness to everything that he sings. His Gondwana Records debut, Inspirations, was produced by Matthew Halsall and featured Halsall together with members of the Gondwana Orchestra. His forthcoming EP with The Gondwana Orchestra, Colors, is a tribute to Pharoah Sanders.