Madeleine Peyroux

Genres:	Documentaries • Jazz • Vocals
Descriptive "tags":	jazz • female vocalists • blues • vocal jazz • singer-songwriter
Decades Active:	1990s • 2000s
Links online:	BBC Music • IMDb • MySpace • Official Homepage • Wikipedia

Biography

1974, Athens, Georgia, USA. A precocious contemporary jazz singer, Madeleine Peyroux was first spotted singing in a Greenwich Village bar in New York, USA, by Atlantic Records Vice President of A&R, Yves Beauvais, in the early 90s. By the advent of her debut album in 1996, Peyroux had already spent much of her young life as a busker and club performer, working principally in Paris and Amsterdam with the Great Lost Wandering Blues And Jazz Band. By this time her uncanny similarity in phrasing and technique to Billie Holiday had already been widely commented upon. This led to Beauvais’ advice to Peyroux that, for someone with a voice so similar to Holiday’s, a straight jazz debut could prove injurious to her career. Instead, Dreamland was more obviously themed around blues and roots music. As Beauvais told Billboard magazine in 1996: ‘I don’t even consider Dreamland a jazz record, just a very eclectic bunch of songs in a variety of...

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