Taste and understatement. Swing and savoir faire. Grace and grooves. Intimacy and panache. Singer Charmin Michelle, delivers all of the above and more.
Ms. Michelle’s savvy art is both fresh and timeless. Her conversational style recalls such earlier greats as Billie Holiday and Nancy Wilson. Yet it’s free of any tiresome camp or easy nostalgia. Charmin Michelle truly understands, feels and puts her own imprint on small group swing singing.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, but raised in chilly Minnesota she’s called the land of Prince and Bob Dylan home ever since. No stranger to the pleasures and pitfalls of the road, Michelle’s had both fun and hair-raising experiences from recording with funkateer Jesse Johnson's Revue and his popular spin-off group, Ta Mara and The Seen to entertaining U. S. troops around the globe.
Her first European tour was as a featured guest with internationally known pianists Mulgrew Miller and Kirk Lightsey the summer of 1997. That tour was set up at the beset of Hammond B-3 organ legend the late Brother Jack McDuff who was one of the singer's biggest fans.
Since 1998 she has performed in jazz festivals throughout Spain, Portugal and France with the Tuxedo Big Band who hail from Toulouse France, and pianist Ignasi Terrazza and big band leader Oriol Bordas of Barcelona Spain.
Less is more could be Charmin Michelle’s motto. Her club and concert sets are always cool, calm and collected. Even when she’s moonlighting in the blues world fronting the jump band, The Senders, Charmin never shouts or strains.
Michelle makes her point more subtly, both as an interpreter of seldom-heard gems from the Great American Songbook. She has released three CD's, all self produced. The first (released in 1994 and currently out of print) Your Eyes, Destination Moon, and her latest HOT released in December 2001. |
