Gretchen Parlato

Gretchen Parlato has slowly carved out a new paradigm for jazz singing in the 21st century, blending the hushed phrasing of bossa nova records she discovered in her parents’ record collection as a child with the tightly coiled, groove-oriented improvisational style of hip-hop-inspired jazz artists like Robert Glasper. Born in Los Angeles in 1976, Parlato studied at UCLA and earned a bachelor’s degree in ethnomusicology and jazz studies. She moved to New York City in 2003, releasing her first album two years later, but it wasn’t until 2009’s In a Dream that the jazz world truly took notice. Parlato developed as composer while deftly blending jazz standards and the stray ’80s pop hit—her 2011 album The Lost and Found includes a take on Simply Red’s “Holding Back the Years”—imbuing such choices with a smoky restraint. In 2013 she took a break from performing, giving birth to her son and teaching at the Manhattan School of Music. She and her husband, drummer and composer Mark Guiliana, moved back to Los Angeles in 2019, where she joined the SFJAZZ Collective. In 2021, she released Flor, her first new recording in a decade.