Kat Parra

The San Jose, CA-based Kat Parra is a flexible and broad-minded jazz vocalist that has quite strong Latin leanings but in addition has been suffering from Middle Eastern, Arabic, and North African music. Oftentimes, the word Latin jazz continues to be used to spell it out Afro-Cuban jazz — and Afro-Cuban music offers, actually, been a significant impact on Parra, that has cited the past due Cuban salsa queen Celia Cruz as you of her idols. But Afro-Cuban music isn’t the only kind of Latin music which has affected Parra, who in addition has mixed jazz with from Brazilian samba to Afro-Peruvian music. Another big impact on Parra (who takes on flute, acoustic guitar, and piano) continues to be the original music of Spain’s Sephardic Jews; Parra, that has documented jazz plans of some common Sephardic tunes (including “Por la Tu Puerta” and “Esta Montanya d’Enfrente”), is usually Jewish herself and offers stated that her traditions is approximately 75 percent Russian Jew and twenty five percent Sephardic Jew. Parra provides performed in a number of different dialects, including British, Spanish (which she talks fluently), Portuguese, French, and Ladino (which may be the vocabulary of Sephardic Jews and is known as among the love dialects). Parra, a North California indigenous who resided in Chile as an adolescent, shifted to Southern California to wait the College or university of California at LA (UCLA), where she researched traditional flute and tone of voice for a season. But Parra came back towards the Silicon Valley region and shifted her educational concentrate to jazz, learning tone of voice at San Jose Condition University with vocalist Patti Cathcart (who was simply half from the husband-and-wife duo Tuck & Patti). Parra (that has referred to Cathcart as her “musical coach” and a significant impact in her lifestyle) continued to invest five years being a business lead vocalist for Charanga Nueve, a Bay Area-based salsa music group that preferred charanga instrumentation (which is well known because of its usage of flute and violin and it is connected with Orquesta Aragón and Orquesta Broadway, among numerous others). When Parra was with Charanga Nueve (whose name means Charanga Nine in Spanish), the music group opened for main salsa artists such as for example Celia Cruz and Cuba’s Los Truck Van; Parra provides said that obtaining a chance to meet up and talk with Cruz was among the features of her profession. Despite everything that musical activity, Parra still got a “time gig” beyond music during her years with Charanga Nueve: she proved helpful for the well-known technology large Cisco Systems. However in 2006, Parra still left Cisco to be always a full-time vocalist and focus on music solely. It had been also in 2006 that Parra’s initial solo album, Wild birds in Air travel, was made by Bay Area-based trombonist Wayne Wallace and released on JazzMa Information. From then on, Parra agreed upon with Wallace’s indie label, Patois Information, which reissued Wild birds in Air travel in 2007. Parra’s second single record, Azucar de Amor (Glucose of Like), was created and mostly organized by Wallace and released by Patois in 2008.