artist info

The four time Grammy nominated vocalist describes her new album best in her liner notes: “Imagine yourself in the city, walking late at night,” she writes. “It’s ‘Round Midnight. The wind is cold, but you hear some warm sounds and you follow your ear down into a small, dark club. There’s a woman at the piano singing these intimate ballads – one after the other. Maybe you’ve just recently suffered a heartache, or maybe the lyrics, melodies and harmonies evoke feelings you have somewhere deep down inside.” This is the experience of Karrin Allyson’s thirteenth album, ‘Round Midnight (2011). The tracks on the album come from a wide variety of sources, including Bill Evans, Paul Simon, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Stephen Sondheim, even Charlie Chaplin. But regardless of who wrote the songs and when, Allyson ties them all together with the same melancholy thread with which they were originally spun.“What I’m most interested in doing on this record – and on all my records – is reaching people and communicating with them,” says Allyson. “That’s the thing that inspires me more than anything else.”

Music lovers and critics around the world marvel at the range of this extraordinary musician, who moves with such ease and authority from the Great American Songbook of Gershwin and Porter to the Great American Jazz Songbook of Duke and Thelonious and Miles and Dizzy, jet-setting to Rio and Paris and then swinging back home to pick up Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell and Jimmy Webb. What brings it together and makes sense of it all is Allyson’s warmth and depth. She’s not just singing a lyric, she’s telling you her story. And then that becomes your story. You hear the music from the inside out.

Allyson lives in New York City, following a childhood in the midwest, schooling in the Bay Area, a degree in classical piano performance, and important stints in Minneapolis and Kansas City, where she began her recording career with Concord Jazz. Among musicians, Allyson is known as a great bandleader known for her highly developed interplay with her bandmates; it sounds so effortless, it conceals the deep musical sophistication. This is one of Allyson’s great achievements — the result of working for more than a decade with an ensemble of fearless and powerfully committed jazz virtuosi.