Album Notes

Jazz pianist and vocalist Carolyn Wilkins has been an active participant in the Boston music scene for over 13 years as a performer, educator and composer.

Ms Wilkins' performance experience includes radio and television appearances with her group SpiritJazz, a concert tour of South America as a Jazz Ambassador for the US State Department, performing with the Pittsburgh Symphony under Andre Previn and in shows featuring Melba Moore, Nancy Wilson and the Fifth Dimension.

Carolyn has performed at Boston's Regattabar, Scullers' Grille, the Globe Jazz Festival and the Many Colors of a Woman Jazz Festival.

She has appeared in concert at Harvard, Brandeis and Boston Universities, and has also been featured four times as a part of Boston's annual First Night Celebration.

A graduate of Oberlin Conservatory and the Eastman School of Music, Carolyn is currently an Associate Professor at Berklee College.

In 1989, Ms Wilkins developed a 45 minute "concert-lecture" designed to introduce an audience aged 2 to 92 to some of jazz's greatest composers, their music and the times they lived in.

For the past ten years, she has given concert-lectures on "What Is This Thing Called Jazz - a History from New Orleans to Coltrane", "Black Women in Jazz" and "The Roots of Jazz - African Music, Spirituals and the Blues" for enthusiastic audiences in libraries, schools and colleges.

Carolyn has released three critically acclaimed CD's of her original compositions entitled SpiritJazz I, SpiritJazz II, and Healin' Time on Tiphareth Records.

A swinging pianist /vocalist in the tradition of Diana Krall, Shirley Horne and Nina Simone, Carolyn's fresh and memorable songs treat subjects as diverse as sex, satire and spirituality with warmth and humor.

Carolyn has composed music for The Search Goes On , an original musical which was performed at First Night 2000, for the NPR adaptation of Langston Hughes' Tell Your Mama, poet Phil Bryant's Southside Suite, and for Return, a Meditational Journey of Self Discovery for Black Women.

The Wright College Choir, the Mt. St. Joseph Chorale, the Emmanuel College Singers, and the Shiloh Gospel Choir have also performed Carolyn's compositions.

Carolyn performs her jazz-influenced spiritual music weekly in her role as Music Director for the Jazz Worship Service at the First Church in Cambridge, MA.

For booking information, call (617)747-8333 or email at cwilkins@berklee.edu.