Tessa Souter

Tessa Souter ( born April 3, 1956 in London) is a British journalist, jazz singer and songwriter.

Life and work

Souters parents are from Trinidad and England; the age of eight she had piano lessons. At twelve, she began self-taught to play guitar and write lyrics to instrumental compositions, but not to include them. At 16 she left home, got married and had a son. After her divorce, she ran into financial difficulties and worked in various jobs; next they finished college and took a job as an editor in a magazine to parents.

In the 1990s she moved to the United States, lived in Lenox (Massachusetts ), New York and San Francisco. She wrote from 1992 to 1996 as a freelancer for various magazines and newspapers, such as The Times, The Independent, Vogue, Elle. In the late 1990s she began a second career as a jazz singer, after she received a scholarship from the Manhattan School of Music in 1998. However, after a semester of music theory, she gave up studying to take private lessons with Mark Murphy.

Since 1999, she has performed among others with Mark Murphy, Joe LaBarbera, Santi Debriano and Howard Johnson. 2004 their debut album Listen Love, followed by Nights of Key Largo (2008), was accompanied on the Kenny Werner, Joel Frahm, Jay Leonhart and Billy Drummond. The album Obsession, it presented in 2009; Souter wrote for her work, which marked the Allmusic as " a kind of modern Anglo - Great American Songbook ," lyrics to compositions by Kenny Barron, Freddie Hubbard and Milton Nascimento; next to it she played also a jazz version of Nick Drake's River Man, the Pete Brown / Jack Bruce Songs White Room and the Beatles classic Eleanor Rigby.