Halie Loren, Vocal jazz Artist

When she sings, her stunning silky voice fills your ear with a delivery that makes every song inviting…you can feel it. This week’s Featured Artist is vocalist, songwriter and producer – Halie Loren

Born in Seattle, Washington, USA

Genre: Jazz

The first thing you notice is that voice: deep and rich and warm, gorgeous, graceful, and somehow earthy and ethereal at once. It is an instrument perfectly pitched and primed to each line, with each audible breath. Just as warm and familiar and frankly right as the needle hitting the groove on vinyl.

In describing the vocal talents of Eugene-based singer/songwriter Halie Loren, the adjectives just start piling up. Heartfelt, confident yet vulnerable, strong but inviting. Authentic is another–emotionally authentic, which, really, is the key to great jazz and great art in general. Think Peggy Lee, Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell–or, more recently, Diana Krall, Norah Jones. But such comparisons are only historic reference points. What’s important to understand is that when she sings, you not only hear the music. You feel it. She’s right there, in the room with you, filling the space with intimate stories of love and heartbreak, memory and hope, experience and passion–in a word, life.

Were Loren’s resume to end here, with her vocal talents, it would be more than enough. Singing of that quality is rare, a gift. But Loren is no mere interpreter of standards. Having cut her songwriting teeth when, as a teenager, she spent an educational year rubbing elbows with some of Nashville’s top composers, this young artist–she is but 25–has penned originals that are stunning for the depth and maturity they show. Take the title song from her 2008 release, They Oughta Write a Song: in a bittersweet croon that is equal parts hurt and healing, Loren delivers lines like, “If there were prizes for those sighs of regret/you’d be the envy of the oh-woe-is-me set/romance is through/it’s just the piper and you…”

Yeah, that’s the stuff–the blues, clever with pain, a sentimental journey hardened into sad-happy wisdom. Loren knows her way around a song, whether it be a composition of her own or one of her surprising and always dead-on covers. Her ingenious arrangement (with frequent collaborator, pianist Matt Treder) turns a radio-overplayed ballad like Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” into something utterly new and unexpectedly affecting, or check out the swinging upbeats and jaunty phrasing that gets the foot tapping to “Dock on the Bay,” without once betraying the spirit of Otis Redding’s masterpiece. Loren’s choice and performance of standards is exquisite and respectful and inventive, another sign of her artistic intelligence.

Since her stage debut at age 10 at the Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Alaska, Loren has continued to woo audiences with her warm, intimate live performances; she is an elegant, electrifying performer, full of charisma and cool. And she has garnered more than her share of in-the-know acknowledgment: from the Female Rising Star and Alternative Entertainer awards she won before she was 16, to later awards from such worthies as Billboard International and the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, up to her most recent award for “Best Vocal Jazz Album” at the 2009 Just Plain Folks Music Awards.

Loren’s debut release, Full Circle (2006), was hailed for exhibiting “a power and grace that are nearly unheard of in popular music.” And along with 2008’s acclaimed They Oughta Write a Song, Loren (accompanied by Treder) also released Many Times, Many Ways, a delightful collection of holiday songs that would melt the heart of the most tone-deaf Scrooge.

For all she has already accomplished, it is what lies ahead that should thrill any fan of Loren’s music. This past year found her elevating her craft with each live performance and newly written song. At present she is planning an altogether different album project that will fuse her unique songwriting chops with her deep roots in jazz. It is this willingness to explore new avenues of creativity–combined with her inexhaustible drive and inimitable talents–that gives one the feeling that Loren is on the verge of setting the wide music world on fire. It’s only a matter of time.