Fleurine

Born in The Netherlands, Fleurine first gravitated toward singing after encountering Ella Fitzgerald’s Song Book series and her celebrated pairings with Louis Armstrong. She trained at the Amsterdam School of High Arts Conservatory; upon completing her studies she moved to New York. Since the early 1990s she has divided her time and professional activities between her native country and the United States. Although rooted in jazz, she began crafting original lyrics for instrumental compositions in order to broaden her expressive range. The resulting repertoire now features works by Ray Bryant, Kenny Dorham, Curtis Fuller, Tom Harrell, Thad Jones, Thelonious Monk, and Joshua Redman. Some of these texts are in English, others in Portuguese. She has performed at Birdland, the Blue Note, and Pizza Express, and has appeared at festivals in Montreal, Edmonton, Havana—where she joined Roy Hargrove as guest vocalist in 1996—Umbria, Istanbul, and on multiple occasions at the North Sea Jazz Festival, including a 1997 collaboration with Brad Mehldau. That encounter led to a Village Vanguard engagement in New York, subsequent international tours, and a 1999 recording session. Additional associates on stage and in the studio have included trumpeters Tom Harrell and Don Sickler, saxophonists Seamus Blake and Ralph Moore, accordionist Gil Goldstein, pianist Renée Rosnes, guitarist Jesse van Ruller, bassists Christian McBride and Johan Plomp, and drummers Jeff Ballard and Billy Drummond. Plomp and van Ruller remain her longstanding rhythm-section partners. Beyond performing, Fleurine has also taken on production responsibilities in the studio. In the early 2000s her programs began incorporating pop repertoire from the 1960s forward, along with jazz-tinged treatments of classic French chansons and contemporary Brazilian pop songs.