Katie King

"I heard this record by Billie Holiday, and it stopped me in my tracks. It was like a voice from heaven speaking loud in my ears." The remark may sound theatrical, yet at age eleven Katie King already traced the moment to the start of her path as a jazz vocalist. While still a teenager in Eugene, Oregon, she absorbed the work of Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan, and Ella Fitzgerald, alongside the pop-oriented recordings of Carly Simon and Joni Mitchell, though the jazz figures ultimately held her focus. Throughout the 1980s she performed with several pop-jazz ensembles before relocating to Seattle’s livelier jazz community, where she encountered and began sitting in with Jeff Johnson, Bob Nixon, Billy Wallace, and Floyd Standifer. Refining her approach in neighborhood clubs, she turned increasingly toward instrumental recordings rather than vocal ones alone, gradually shaping a personal approach to jazz singing. The outcome is a melodic style marked by precise phrasing and a voice that does more than deliver lyrics, instead shaping and sustaining them with care. Her debut release, Mostly Ballads, issued in 1993 as a direct tribute to Billie Holiday, was followed by Jazz Figures in 1994, One for My Baby in 1998, and Side Trip in 1999. With each project the vocalist moved further toward recognition as a distinctive interpreter on the contemporary scene, taking her place among singers who occupy the space left by the departures of Fitzgerald, Vaughan, and McRae. These artists do not imitate their predecessors but instead present individual voices that audiences may choose to embrace.