Nicky Schrire

Nicky Schrire is a versatile and inventive vocalist and composer whose work has earned her comparisons to artists like Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos, and Esperanza Spalding. She has performed in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, London, Dublin and South Africa, with musicians ranging from Abdullah Ibrahim, Arno Carstens, and Sibongile Khumalo, to Grammy-nominated pianists Gerald Clayton and Gil Goldstein.

A graduate of New York’s Manhattan School of Music, she released three critically acclaimed jazz albums-2012's Freedom Flight, 2013's Space and Time, and the 2014 EP To The Spring, which earned her comparisons to songwriters like Joan Baez, Becca Stevens, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. With this encouragement, and her jazz stylings borrowing more and more from the folk genre, she recorded a singer-songwriter EP entitled An Education. The recording features her long-time collaborator cellist Ariella Caira, and was released on the London folk label Wild Sound Recordings in June 2015.

In 2018, Schrire led her band in a performance at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival that saw journalist Gwen Ansell note that “[Schrire] is doing important work growing an authentic indigenous vocal repertoire that talks about us – and then singing it shrewdly and sweetly.” She also performed her contemporary classical suite Escape: The Ingrid Jonker Suite, which sees Jonker’s poems set to music arranged for string quartet and voice, at the 2018 Suidoosterfees and the 2018 Franschhoek Literary Festival. The suite was performed again in 2019 to a sold out venue at the Norval Foundation. Often praised for her choice of repertoire, Hardbop Jazz Journal described her as “clever and understated” while All About Jazz UK wrote that “in the crowded world of jazz vocals it helps to have a distinctive voice or a distinctive repertoire. Schrire scores on both counts.”    

Links

Website: www.nickyschrire.com

Facebook: facebook.com/nickyschriremusic

YouTube: http://youtube.com/nickyschrire