Daughter of longtime record producer Ed Michel—who, she has noted, conferred no particular career edge—Lisa Michel has spent the past dozen years immersed in New York’s jazz community. Her debut professional appearance came in 1987 while she pursued classical voice studies at the New England Conservatory of Music; around the same time she launched her own ensemble that featured pianist John Medeski, later a member of Medeski, Martin & Wood. Setting aside opera and lieder in favor of jazz, she relocated to New York and frequented the Knitting Factory, the hub of its avant-garde activity. She also traveled regularly to Philadelphia for lessons with Dennis Sandole, the instructor once associated with John Coltrane.
In 1991 she met pianist David Berkman, who has remained her closest musical collaborator ever since. Together they traveled to Europe in 1993, performing in Berlin and Hamburg clubs alongside a German swing band she later described as “not very good, but willing to try hard.” Session work followed: she appeared on Leni Stern’s Black Guitar (1997) and Recollection (1998) and contributed to recordings by Sam Newsome and the Global Unity. A second German tour in 1998 proved more successful than the first; that same year she performed at the Heritage & Jazz Festival in St. Louis and shared a bill with Stern at the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival in Washington, D.C. Her voice can also be heard on the soundtrack to independent filmmaker Linda Kandel’s 1999 feature Mascara.
Michel possesses a lush, clear, and bright instrument that moves fluidly across blues, swing, and ballads. Those qualities are prominently displayed on her debut album You Should Be Nicer to Me, which she composed and recorded with Berkman; the project positioned her among the rising figures in contemporary jazz vocal performance. When Summer Comes appeared later in 1999.
