Tessa Souter

Tessa Souter /ˈsuːtər/ is an English and Trinidadian singer-songwriter based in New York City, one of New York's leading jazz vocalists. Her music has Spanish, Northern African, Middle Eastern, Indian, Brazilian, flamenco, and Celtic influences. She has also worked as a journalist, writing for such publications as The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, Elle, Vogue, and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Tessa Souter was born in London to a Trinidadian father and an English mother. She studied piano from the age of 8 until, at 12, her piano teacher heard her voice and encouraged her to take up singing. She learned guitar by ear to accompany herself and began writing songs. She graduated with a degree in English literature from London University and got her first job in journalism at Parents magazine, before going on to freelance as a features writer for, among other British press The Independent, The Times, Elle, Vogue, as well as Australian Elle, Sydney Morning Herald and HQ. An interview for the UK's Sunday Correspondent magazine with Stefan Lorant led her to visit him in Massachusetts, and a trip to visit another friend in San Francisco turned into a four-year soujourn, where she worked as a house cleaner for two years before establishing herself as a freelance journalist for the UK, American, Australian, and Hong Kong. In 1994, she was one of the founding members of the Writer's Grotto.

At around the same time she first sang in public, at the Mint Karaoke Bar, urged on by her then-current boyfriend, a musicologist, with whom she moved to New York in 1997 to pursue his PhD at Columbia University. Once there, she continued her writing career and began sitting in on jam sessions around the city. Soon after, she won a scholarship to Manhattan School of Music, but dropped out after one semester to pursue her career and study privately with Mark Murphy who invited her to run his workshops in exchange for mentoring her.

She has performed at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola (Jazz at Lincoln Center), The Blue Note, Joe's Pub, The Jazz Standard, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, The Kitano, London's Pizza Express, Dean Street, Pizza on the Park, and Ronnie Scott's, Omsk, Ekaterinburg, Kirov, Samara, Vitebsk and Minsk Philharmony, among other Philharmonic halls in Russia and Belarus.

She has performed and/or recorded with such jazz artists as Steve Kuhn, Joe Locke, Gary Versace, David Finck, Joel Frahm, Gary Versace, Jay Leonhart, Kenny Werner, Ron McLure, Billy Drummond, Gene Bertoncini, Lew Soloff, Santi Debriano, Daniel Kramer, John Hart, Essiet Essiet, Jay Leonhart, Marvin Sewell, Romero Lubambo, Gwilym Simcock, Nikki Iles, Asaf Sirkis, Winston Clifford, Lekan Babalola, Howard Johnson, Joe LaBarbera, and Larry Koonse.
Musical influences and style

Souter's musical influences include Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Milton Nascimento, Billie Holiday, Carmen Jones, Captain Beefheart, Sandy Denny, Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Mark Murphy, Andy Bey, Sheila Jordan, Nancy Wilson, Dianne Reeves among many others.

She has been called "stunningly original" (Christopher Loudon of JazzTimes), "an astute and expressive jazz singer" (Nate Chinen of The New York Times) and her compositions have been described by Siddhartha Mitter of The Boston Globe as "... scintillating ... haunting ... poetic and concise, ... Souter ... writes in much the same way that she sings: with great poise, attention to space, and little ornamentation."
Discography

Listen Love (Nara, 2004)
Nights of Key Largo (Venus, 2008)
Obsession (Motéma Music, 2009)
Beyond the Blue (Venus, 2011)

Souter's crystalline contralto and impeccable phrasing are mighty arrows in her quiver, but it is her ability to become one with a song, finding its intrinsic core and allowing its sentiments to grow organically, that enables her to score successive bull's eyes.... Christopher Loudon, JazzTimes (March 2010) "I would not now be a singer, had I not lived in San Francisco in my 30s. And although I sometimes wish I'd started earlier, I think coming to it late was a good thing for me," says London-born...

Read more about Tessa Souter on Last.fm.


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