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She's being compared to Nora Jones.
17-year old jazz prodigy Nikki Yanofsky
Saturday, April 23 at 7 p.m. $59 & $56

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Nikki Yanofsky is a 17‐year‐old (her birthday was in February) musical prodigy.

Since her debut at the 2006 Montreal International Jazz Festival, where she won the hearts of the 100,000+ audience, Nikki has never looked back.

Early accomplishments in her career were plentiful. At age 13, she was the youngest singer ever on a Verve Records release when she recorded Airmail Special for the Ella Fitzgerald tribute album We All Love Ella: Celebrating the First Lady of Song, alongside such musical luminaries as Etta James, Linda Ronstadt, Diana Krall and Natalie Cole. She began an ongoing collaboration with Marvin Hamlisch that has taken her across North America to perform with many esteemed symphony orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic. She also recorded the swing‐era classic Stompin’ At The Savoy with Grammy Award‐winning artists Herbie Hancock and Will.i.am for Kareem Abdul‐Jabbar’s audio book, On the Shoulders of Giants. Also, in the realm of popular music, Nikki was asked to record Gotta Go My Own Way for Disney’s smash hit High School Musical 2. The song was included in French and English on the Canadian release of the soundtrack, and in the bonus features of the worldwide DVD release. Nikki has also starred with renowned hip‐hop artist Wyclef Jean on episodes of PBS' current version of The Electric Company and spent her fourteenth birthday at Carnegie Hall being broadcast internationally on PBS’s youth talent showcase From the Top. In 2008, Nikki released Ella…Of Thee I Swing – a live CD/DVD package recorded in Montreal. Garnering critical acclaim and gold-level sales, it earned Nikki two Juno nominations, New Artist of the Year and Vocal Jazz Album of the Year.

Most recently, Nikki was a featured artist at the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games held in Vancouver. Performing at the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics as well as the opening ceremony of the Paralympics, Nikki was introduced to a world‐wide audience estimated at 3.2 billion people. Nikki was also chosen to sing I Believe, the anthem for Canadian spirit during the Olympics. Written by Stephan Moccio (Celine Dion) and Alan Frew (Glass Tiger), this song quickly became a #1 hit on iTunes Canada and the Billboard Canada Top 100 chart. The single had the highest first‐week sales of any Canadian artist in SoundScan history and was certified quadruple‐platinum, making Nikki the youngest artist to ever achieve quadruple-platinum status in Canada. That same week, Ella... of Thee I Swing went back to the top of the iTunes Canada Jazz Albums Chart and her single I Got Rhythm went to the top of the iTunes Canada Jazz Songs Chart. This was the first time since the inception of digital downloading that an artist has held these #1 positions concurrently.

Nikki has used her budding fame to help the underprivileged – becoming an ambassador for the Montreal Children’s Hospital, The Children's Wish Foundation and MusiCounts. Nikki has also recently joined her fellow Canadian artists in recording K’Naan’s hit song Wavin’ Flag for Young Artists for Haiti. Being sold on iTunes as a single and video, the proceeds have directly impacted the lives of children, families and communities in Haiti through the relief and rebuilding efforts of Free the Children, War Child Canada and World Vision Canada. The local, national and international charity events that Nikki has been involved with to date have raised well over $10 million.

Nikki’s first studio album, Nikki, was released by Decca Records in the spring of 2010. The album opened in Canada in the top 5 and achieved gold sales status within 3 months. In the United States, Nikki debuted at #1 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart. Produced by 14‐time Grammy Award‐winner Phil Ramone and Grammy-Award winner Jesse Harris (Norah Jones), Nikki features new arrangements of classic jazz songs as well as some of Nikki’s first original music. It includes collaborations with Harris and celebrated Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith, as well as a song written for Nikki by Feist.

A sold-out concert in Nikki’s hometown of Montreal was filmed and released on DVD as Live In Montreal. The receptive audience was treated to a set by Nikki, backed by her band as well as a full horn section and backup vocalists, who performed the jazz and pop classics she is known for, as well as several of the new originals that also appear on her debut studio album. The DVD shipped gold and is garnering rave reviews. The performance has been aired extensively on PBS, as part of their 2010 pledge drives.

Summer of 2010 saw Nikki making her initial tour of European jazz festivals, her first appearance in Israel, and a concert with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa. A highlight of the European tour was a special guest appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival with Quincy Jones’ Global Gumbo All-Stars, in which Nikki had the honor of performing with many of the greatest jazz musicians alive, including the iconic Herbie Hancock. The concert was filmed in HD, and is being planned for a 2011 DVD & Blu-Ray release.

With barely time to rest, Nikki began the fall of 2010 with her first extensive tour of the United States, a partnership with PBS affiliates nationwide. Additionally, Nikki made her fourth visit to Japan in sixteen months, as well as debuting at the famed Pizza Express Club in London as part of a promotional tour of the UK. She also performed at influential Paris jazz club Duc Des Lombards, in anticipation of the European release of Nikki. One week later, the album debuted at #1 on the French jazz charts. On October 16, 2010, Nikki was the inaugural recipient of the first annual Allan Slaight Award; one of the highest honors of her young career. This award recognizes excellence, philanthropy and longevity in a young Canadian in the performing arts and was presented at the Canada Walk Of Fame Awards gala. A week after this esteemed honor, Nikki was in New York City making her debut at the world famous jazz club, The Blue Note, selling out both sets with lineups around the block.

2010 closed in top form when iTunes worldwide named Nikki as the Vocal Jazz Album Of The Year in their annual Rewind list.

2011 will surely be another benchmark year in the career of the young prodigy. Nikki will hit the ground running when during Grammy weekend, she will reunite with Herbie Hancock in Los Angeles for a performance at a MusiCares Foundation gala honoring Barbra Streisand. The star-studded bill also includes Stevie Wonder, Tony Bennett, Diana Krall, and the cast of Glee, among others. Additionally, Nikki’s plans include a jazz vocal all-star concert tour entitled Three Generations Of Divas in which she will be appearing with superstars Dianne Reeves and Jane Monheit, promotion behind the highly anticipated UK release of Nikki, and several months spent away from the spotlight, writing and recording songs for her second studio album for Decca Records, expected for a fall 2011 release. With all of these heavy commitments, Nikki will also find time to keep up her “A” average in her last year of high school, and prepare for her graduation in the spring!

With professional and artistic success on an incline with no end in sight, the future is bright for Nikki Yanofsky.

View a photo gallery of Nikki; click the image below.

                      $209. LIMITED AVAILABILITY, RESERVE EARLY.

A REVIEW OF HER CD 'NIKKI' BY JOHN FORDHAM, THE GUARDIAN (UK), JAN 13 11

The Norahs, Dianas and Madeleines of the current jazz-diva business might well extend a warm welcome to the 16-year-old Canadian vocal phenomenon Nikki Yanofsky – but they could be forgiven for sticking pins in her effigy. With an awesome grasp of the technicalities of the past 80-odd years of western popular vocals, and a precocious confidence for anything and everything she sings, Yanofsky exhibits a potential that gives even the most curmudgeonly of jazzers pause, not least because half this set is made up of pretty convincing originals. Madeleine Peyroux keysman Larry Goldings and Burt Bacharach producer Phil Ramone contribute, and Yanofsky powers through Ella-inspired swing classics such as Take the A Train and I Got Rhythm. Only Yanofsky's signature post-Motown account of Somewhere Over the Rainbow borders on the overblown. Yanofsky can be a retro-music star for years if she wants – but the real surprises may be yet to come.

REVIEW FROM JAZZ TODAY, JULY 2010

Forever Young by William Layman

Jazz applauds virtuosity, generally. It’s almost mandato

ry that a player or singer needs real technique to make it in jazz. Thus, jazz audiences are susceptible to the lure of the prodigy. “Wow,” they tend to think, “how did that kid get so good so fast?”

Enter Nikki Yanofsky.

Yanofsky first appeared as a 12-year-old singer, a little girl from Quebec who seemed to be channeling Ella Fitzgerald in a hardcore way. I remember the first time someone sent me a YouTube link featuring this little girl, who was spilling out scat choruses and seemed to be placing every syllable on the swinging beat with astonishing ease and assurance. Amazing talent, I thought, but she’s a little girl.

In 2010, Yanofsky is 16, but she seems astonishingly much more mature. She received worldwide exposure by jazzing up “O, Canada” at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, and May sees the release of her first real recording: a disc that splits time between the singer’s obvious affection—even passion—for half-century-old jazz singing and her genuine ease with more contemporary pop in the Norah Jones bag.

Is she still a little girl, a prodigy who powerfully copies more original artists, or is she someone with a clear sense of what she wants to communicate? Is the latter too much to ask of a 16-year-old, no matter how talented? Hasn’t she already cleared the bar by a mile, in a world where few 16-year-olds even know who Ella Fitzgerald is, much less find themselves challenged to nail her perfect time, ringing tone, and clarion joy of singing.

In Her Own Words

On the afternoon before she would appear the New York’s Dizzy’s Club Coca-cola to launch her debut disc in the US, Yanofsky was talkative. Mile-a-minute so.

Yanofsky’s pace in conversation tells you something about her music. Both fly. The seemingly caffeinated pre-teen with braces who you first saw doing the Ella scat-classic “Airmail Special” is the same one running staccato sentences across her throat with conversational verve. She is bubbly, but manically—charmingly—so.

The story of how she discovered jazz has been told plenty. A singing teacher who had been challenging her with tough songs suggested “Airmail Special”, and Nikki loved it. In seemingly no time at all, Fitzgerald became her favorite singer and primary influence. For a young girl possessing out-sized technique, this made sense. Like Ella, Nikki learned from records, started singing young (17 in Ella’s case) and projects an irresistible exuberance of spirit. Also like Ella, Nikki will likely be accused of prizing speed and attack over a nuanced approach to lyrics.

The comparison, however, goes only so far. The Yanofsky of 2010 does not sound all that much like Fitzgerald, even as she channels Fitzgerald’s athletic sense of play and energy. Even on the straight jazz material, Yanofsky is slowly becoming her own. The “Take the A Train” on Nikki contains some husky growl and not a little muscular punch that suggests how much R&B the young singer has absorbed.

“I don’t consider myself a jazz singer”, Yanofsky admits—or brags?—quite clearly. “I just sing everything.”

Sure enough, her debut disc works more than one angle. “A Train”, “I Got Rhythm”, “God Bless the Child”, “You’ll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini)”, and “On the Sunny Side of the Street” are among the hoariest of standards. An equal number of the tracks are variants of the Norah Jones formula of friendly/folkie soul-pop songs written by Yanofsky along with Ron Sexsmith and Jesse Harris, the very guy who penned “Don’t Know Why”.

When asked what other jazz singers have made an impact on her other than Fitzgerald, Yanofsky cites Tony Bennett, Billie Holiday, Nat (and Natalie) Cole, Anita O’Day, Jon Hendricks, and Doris Day. The affinity for Hendricks is obvious—Yanofsky is most purely “jazzy” when she is scatting in a light, crisp voice that avoids too much vibrato. At times her tone (check out the start of her Ella-rific “Mr. Paganini”) is creamy and sunny like Day. She will tell you that the less Ella-ish singers have “helped me a lot with my time”.

Frankly, though, the influence who hovers over her sound on most of Nikki is Natalie Cole, who has straddled modern soul and jazz with a kind of workmanlike versatility. Yanofsky, at least in the past year, seems to be moving with a canny strategy between jazz, adult-pleasing pop (“I Believe”, the Olympic “theme song” that seems infinitely more Celine Dion than Ella/Billie), and the hip-ly cool pop on Nikki that seems much more likely to accompany a latte than appeal to other 16-year-olds.

When talking to you, Yanofsky seems plainly aware of the marketing strategy of her young career. “I was hyped up to be a jazz singer, but I’ve never felt that way”, she reports, with not a little pride. “I want to be able to do anything in the future and not have it surprise anyone.”

What’s Real, What’s the Package?

Just when you sense that Yanofsky is being handled supremely well by her managers, the teenage Nikki bursts forth, utterly unmanaged. Her voice prattles and spins just like any other teen’s as she tells you how she mainly likes to “hang out with my friends, go to the movies. But”, she notes, “it is getting harder.” She’s recognizable now, and just when her friends are relaxing, someone will approach her. “‘Did that guy just ask you to give him an autograph?’ my friends ask. Weird!”

It’s not necessarily “packaging” when Yanofsky admits that she doesn’t know exactly what band will be backing her up at Dizzy’s. It certainly doesn’t seem packaged when she admits that her technical knowledge of music theory is limited. “To be honest, my singing coach has been trying but it just doesn’t stick. We keep coming back to the circle of fifths, but I just keep coming back to just singing.”

It’s not really boasting but more a certain teenage thrill when she notes that, when she works with Harris and Sexsmith, “they treat me like an equal”. On the one hand, she’s happy that “some of my best friends are, like, forty years old” but on the other hand, “I brought one of my girlfriends to the Juno Awards last year.”

That said, Nikki itself is a calculated affair, with Phil Ramone producing. The jazz tunes are as short as the pop songs (five minutes or less), with strong melodies and only the briefest instrumental solos. The pop songs are custom-made for adults, with subtle backbeats and ringing electric pianos where a contemporary pop record would use hip hop groove and crunching guitars. While Yanofsky gets her soul on here, it’s a young girl’s simulacrum of soul. The package strives to appeal to mainstream grown-ups—not necessarily jazz fans and not a fan base that might move on quickly. Nikki is a plan for the future.

Is Yanofsky worried that comparisons to both Ella Fitzgerald and Norah Jones mean that she isn’t yet herself? “I think that people will make these comparisons, but not me. It’s human nature to compare. That’s okay.”

Fair enough. Yanofsky seems to be having the time of her life doing exactly what she loves. “I am always going to be singing. I think I might go to music school. But I see myself as singing all the time.” The pop songs may seem overly grown-up, but she co-wrote every last one. Lines like “And don’t it seem strange how time just drifts away?” may not seem to be the honest preoccupations of a normal teenager, but maybe Yanofsky deserves the benefit of the doubt. After all, she is a kid who got hip to jazz when she was still wearing braces.

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