Lauren Hooker

Like so a great many other jazz music artists, composer, lyricist, and vocalist Lauren Hooker spent a lot of her profession actively teaching others the nuances of jazz singing and jazz structure. It required some time, however in 2007 she finally released her long-awaited debut recording, Best Where I Belong, with jazz veterans like bassist Rufus Reid, pianist Allen Farnham, and drummer Tim Horner associated her. Hooker’s debut contains her originals, some requirements, and her originals arranged to music by Monk, Mingus, Wayne Shorter, Body fat Waller, and Mal Waldron. Hooker arrived to the jazz picture in NY and northern NJ — where lots of the celebrities of NY City’s picture in fact live — in the first ’80s, after she graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University or college with a level in music education. Hooker continuing post-graduate just work at Rutgers University or college, New Brunswick, with pianist Kenny Barron and analyzed jazz vocals with Sheila Jordan in the Manhattan College of Music. Hooker started playing piano like a four-year-old and required her motivation from her dad, Louis Hooker, a conductor, jazz educator, and musician who also trained at Fairleigh Dickinson University or college. Her father frequently hosted rehearsals and jam classes in the cellar of their house as well as the youthful Hooker fulfilled pianist Costs Evans using one of his engagements on the Community Vanguard. Hooker expresses in her biography associated Best Where I Belong that, provided her father’s recognized profession being a jazz educator and conductor, “I had not been only prompted, but likely to be considered a musician, and a well-rounded one at that; person who could compose, play, sing, arrange and inform.” Over time, Hooker provides performed and documented with a brief who’s who of jazz people: Dena DeRose, Bob DeVos, Vic Juris, Rufus Reid, Steve Nelson, Bobby Watson, and Reggie Workman, amongst others, who mainly regular the Manhattan and north New Jersey membership corridor. Hooker provides performed at all of the major jazz locations in Manhattan and north New Jersey during the period of three years, and provides performed on the International Ladies in Jazz Celebration at St. Peter’s Cathedral in NEW YORK. Her multimedia present Jazz Expressions, merging first music, dance, poetry, and picture taking, was premiered in 1997 on the Puffin Cultural Community forum in Teaneck, NJ with bassist Calvin Hill and pianist Tomoko Ohno.