Jan Ponsford

b. 1954, Britain. As a kid she somehow were able to sidestep Beatlemania and started performing along with information and the air to music that was frequently instrumental instead of vocal. She’d improvise lyrics or scat to anything from classics to rock and roll. While going to the Reading Jazz And Blues Festival she noticed George Melly with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers. ‘It sounded therefore content and alive and acoustic compared to what else was happening.’ Thus diverted, her fascination with jazz became just like eclectic as her additional musical passions, turning from Melly to Archie Shepp easily. She started listening to performers as varied as Ella Fitzgerald and Helen Merrill and Joni Mitchell. She also paid attention to bands such as for example Count number Basie’s and folk organizations like Pentangle. She started singing appropriately with Big Main, a jazz rock and roll fusion band including Dick Heckstall-Smith in its rates. Her listening preferences stayed angled towards contemporary jazz, with particular favourites getting Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, and performers including Stevie Question and Roberta Flack. The wide variety of Ponsford’s musical passions and her looking stylistic endeavours led undoubtedly to her developing her very own group, Vocal Chords, which in the middle-90s acquired a line-up that bespeaks the most effective in modern vocal skill: Norma Winstone, Ian Shaw, Winston Clifford, Liane Carroll, Jill Francis, Clare Foster and Anton Browne. Outspoken in her needs and wants, and positive in her profession programs, Ponsford, who also shows, is actually a tone of voice – performing and speaking – to pay attention out for in the foreseeable future.