Katie King

“I heard this record by Billie Vacation, and it stopped me personally in my songs. It was just like a tone of voice from heaven speaking noisy in my own ears.” A little dramatic, perhaps. Simply 11 years of age during this revelation, Katie Ruler nonetheless feels this experience began her later on to a profession like a jazz vocalist. Subsequently, as an adolescent in Eugene, Oregon, Ruler started to pay attention to those additional doyennes of jazz performing, Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan, and Ella Fitzgerald, aswell concerning sich lesser lamps as Carly Simon and Joni Mitchell. Nonetheless it was the purveyors of jazz music who got her interest. Through the ’80s, Ruler began dealing with pop-jazz rings, then relocated to the more vigorous jazz picture of Seattle, where she fulfilled and started to sit along with operating jazz music artists like Jeff Johnson, Bob Nixon, Billy Wallace, and Floyd Standifer. Honing her jazz vocal abilities by employed in regional clubs round the Seattle region, Ruler began to pay attention even more to instrumental, instead of exclusively vocal, music as she carved out her personal niche in the wonderful world of jazz performing. The result is certainly a melodic audio with exceptional phrasing and a tone of voice that more than merely recites the lyrics, but caresses and massages them aswell. Her first record, Mostly Ballads, properly an homage to Billie Vacation, premiered in 1993. This is accompanied by Jazz Statistics in 1994, One for My Baby in 1998, and Aspect Trip in 1999. Each record takes this participating vocalist one stage further in getting one of the most accomplished tune stylists on today’s picture. The albums also display that she belongs among those great, contemporary performers out there attempting to fill up voids created with the departure of Fitzgerald, Vaughan, and McRae. Fill up, not really replicate, as these clean vocalists possess their own designs which they turn to the hearing public to get into and acknowledge.