Kat Edmonson

Possessing a fleet, light voice and a sly touch, jazz vocalist Kat Edmonson brings both the songs and the sensibility of the Great American Songbook into the 21st century. Her 2009 debut album, Take to the Sky, split the difference between Cole Porter and the Cure, and as she continued to record over the course of the 2010s, she started to incorporate more and more original material on her albums. In 2020, she tipped the balance back toward covers with Dreamers Do. A native of Houston, Texas, Edmonson began to write songs as a child, and after attending South Carolina's College of Charleston for a time, she relocated to Austin, Texas to pursue a musical career. After an unsuccessful audition for the second season of American Idol, she hunkered down in Austin and developed her idiosyncratic vocal style. In 2009, she independently released her debut, Take to the Sky, which wound up climbing into the Top 20 of the Billboard jazz charts. Three years later she issued Way Down Low, which made it to number three on the jazz chart and number one on the Heatseekers chart in the wake of positive notices on NPR and in The New York Times. After Way Down Low, Edmonson signed to Sony Masterworks, which released The Big Picture in 2014. Featuring production by Mitchell Froom, it returned her to the top of the Heatseekers chart and climbed to number two on the Jazz Albums chart. She made an appearance as a singer in Woody Allen's 2016 film Café Society before starting work on her fourth album. Produced by Edmonson, the resulting Old Fashioned Gal was issued in 2018 and became another Top Three jazz album for the singer and songwriter. Two years later, the mostly covers album Dreamers Do was co-produced with Aaron Thurston of indie rock group French Kicks. It featured a guest spot by Bill Frisell on her version of the Disney tune "The Age of Not Believing" from Bedknobs and Broomsticks. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi