Background
Karrin Allyson was born in Great Bend, Kansas. Her father was a Lutheran minister and her mother was a psychotherapist, teacher and classical pianist. She grew up in Omaha, and spent her senior high school year in San Francisco.
pianist singer songwriter jazz musician
Karrin Allyson was born in Great Bend, Kansas. Her father was a Lutheran minister and her mother was a psychotherapist, teacher and classical pianist. She grew up in Omaha, and spent her senior high school year in San Francisco.
Allyson attended the University of Nebraska at Omaha on a classical piano scholarship. She majored in classical piano and minored in French.
She has been nominated for five Grammy Awards, and has received positive reviews from several prominent sources, including the New York Times, which has called her a "singer with a feline touch and impeccable intonation."
In addition to her classical-music studies at university, Allyson was lead singer for her own all-female rock band, Tomboy. She also developed an avid interest in jazz, performing both in a jazz swing choir at United Nations Organization and in her own jazz ensemble, which had gigs at various Omaha venues. After graduating from United Nations Organization in 1986, Allyson moved to Minneapolis, and concentrated on her jazz career.
In 1990, she moved to Kansas City, where her jazz career took official
In 1992 she recorded her debut album, I Didn"t Know About You, which was so well received it was re-released on Concord Records in 1993. She subsequently recorded eight more Concord-released albums in Kansas City.
In 1998, she moved to New York City with her longtime partner, classical music radio host Bill McGlaughlin, whom she met in Kansas City in the early 1990s. Allyson sings in English, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish.
The songs she performs are drawn from a variety of genres, including bossa nova, blues, bebop, samba, jazz standards, and other jazz modalities, and also ballads, popular standards, the Great American Songbook, soft rock, and folk rock.
She has also recorded vocal performances of several instrumental jazz compositions, using both scat and vocalese techniques. She has recorded 12 original studio albums for the Concord Jazz label, and in 2009 she released a career-spanning "best of" collection. Five of Allyson"s albums — Ballads: Remembering John Coltrane (2001), Footprints (2006), Imagina: Songs of Brasil (2008), "Round Midnight (2011), and Many a New Day: Karrin Allyson Sings Rodgers & Hammerstein(2015) — have received Grammy nominations for Best Jazz Vocal Album.
Allyson tours extensively, both in the United States and internationally.