Artist Angela Verbrugge was one of the youngest graduates from Toronto’s George Brown School of Performing Arts after a youth spent active on the arts scene of her birth city, Kingston, Ontario. She relocated to Vancouver in 1997 and started spending most of her time in Victoria in 2019. After having three kids and three brushes with death (drowning, car accident, and cancer), she followed her passion for jazz by curating her musical education through mentorship from band-mates, jam sessions, and over the years through Vancouver musicians such as Miles Black, Jennifer Scott, Karin Plato, and Kate Hammett-Vaughan. A life-long student, Angela has sought out lessons from acclaimed vocalists and musicians including Karrin Allyson, Sheila Jordan, Rebecca Kilgore, and technique under masters such as Caity Gyorgy, Lisa Popeil, Cecile LaRochelle, and Judith Rabinovitch.
Verbrugge has been described as possessing a winsome, brightly-burnished, pliable voice. Her debut album, The Night We Couldn’t Say Good Night was released through Gut String Records in 2019, with much acclaim.
She’s set to release her new album, titled “Love for Connoisseurs” this March 22nd. All twelve songs feature Verbrugge’s original lyrics to either new or existing jazz compositions by modern-day composers. Her vision for this project was to create a new vocal jazz repertoire by collaborating with composers that write innovative, yet catchy, melodies in the style of the classic jazz standards. Angela listened to thousands of hours of music in jazz clubs and online to find and select these songs that would be a fit for both her storytelling style as a lyricist and vocalist. She composed three of her own tunes as well. One song is a French-language adaptation of the title track from her first record. The six composers she teamed up with are some of the best bebop-oriented jazz musicians on the scene today: New Yorkers Ken Fowser, Nick Hempton, Ray Gallon, Neal Miner, and Vancouverites Miles Black and Saul Berson. Angela dreams that these songs could become enduring and modern additions to jazz standards’ songbooks and that other vocalists and instrumentalists will want to perform these tunes. She hopes to hear from listeners that the music and stories on Love for Connoisseurs resonate with them.
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