Chiara Izzi

Chiara Izzi| Thursday , Feb. 19,  7 p.m. | Doors open at 6 p.m.

Tickets: $30 members; $35 not-yet-members; $17 students (13+)

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Chiara Izzi is an award-winning singer-songwriter from Italy who has been based in New York City since 2014, three years after Quincy Jones awarded her first prize in the 2011 Montreux International Jazz Festival Vocal Competition. In April 2020 she also won one Independent Music Award for Best Jazz song with Vocals with her composition “Circles Of The Mind”. Since arriving, she’s become one of New York’s busiest vocalists, sharing bandstands with such luminaries as Kevin Hays, Leon Parker, Ken Peplowski, Diego Figueiredo, Jeff Hamilton, Aaron Goldberg, Bruce Barth, Eliot Zigmund, Warren Wolf, and Anthony Wonsey.

Izzi began her musical journey in Campobasso, a city of 50,000 that is the capital of the Molise region of southeastern Italy, situated between Rome and Naples. Before focusing exclusively on singing during her teens, she studied classical piano seriously for almost a decade. She recalls first singing at 8 years old, and continued to sing while participating in various school functions. At 17 she was referred to the president of Campobasso’s Thelonious Monk School, which Izzi describes as “a small, very good jazz school with teachers who were professional musicians – they suggested that I study piano jazz and singing.” Not long after embarking on her jazz studies, Izzi formed her first band with several fellow students, with whom she participated in an immersive week-long event in Belgium that involved singing every day with a cohort of musicians from around the world. Rather than enroll in a conservatory, Izzi worked towards a Bachelors degree in Communications and Media in Campobasso, and learned by doing. “I started to go deeper into jazz, listening to records, finding my own way,” she says.

“My own music includes Brazilian influences, influences from classical music, and things from Pop and Jazz. I take ideas from whatever music I feel an affinity with, and then I try to make it my own. That’s the important thing for me. Otherwise I couldn’t express myself, and I’d probably get bored with myself, too, which I hate to do on stage.”