Janis siegel program

Mon & Tue

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FEB 26 & 27 7:30 pm

Pavilion

Janis Siegel, with piano Just Friends Jazz Series

Sponsored by

We are pleased to partner with the Lied Center of Kansas to present the Just Friends Jazz Series.

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FEB 26 & 27 | Janis Siegel, with piano

There will be no intermission during this performance.

Selections will be announced from the stage.

Janis Siegel

Over the past four decades, the voice of Janis Siegel, a nine-time Grammy Awardwinner and a seventeen-time Grammy Award-nominee, has been an undeniable force in The Manhattan Transfer’s diverse musical catalog. Alongside her career as a founding member of this musical institution, Siegel has also sustained a solo career that has spawned almost a dozen finely-crafted solo albums and numerous collaborative projects, amassed a large international fan base and garnered consistently high critical praise.

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1952, Siegel learned about the music business at an early age. By the time she was 12, she was singing with an all-girl pop trio called The Young Generation. She drew inspiration from a wide variety of artists and groups, from Aretha Franklin to The Beatles and Barbra Streisand. On the jazz side, she remembers John Coltrane as her musical idol during her high school and college years. After graduating from high school, the trio shifted from pop to acoustic folk and rechristened themselves Laurel Canyon. Siegel was in college on a nursing scholarship, but left school in the early ‘70s to focus all of her energy on her music career.

A chance encounter with Tim Hauser eventually led to Siegel joining a group with Hauser, Laurel Massé and Alan Paul; and the Manhattan Transfer was born. The group’s self-titled debut album in 1975 ushered in a renaissance in vocal-based music and marked the opening chapter of the foursome’s success story.

Over the years, Siegel’s unmistakable voice has become one of the group’s most recognizable trademarks. She sang lead on some of the Transfer’s biggest hits, such as “Operator,” “Chanson D’Amour,” “Twilight Zone,” “Birdland,” “Shaker Song,” “The Boy from N.Y.C.,” “Spice of Life,” “Sassy” and “Mystery.” She also gained a reputation as a vocal arranger by writing five of the charts for the group’s acclaimed masterwork, Vocalese; seven charts for the group’s Grammy-winning album Brazil; and won a Grammy herself in 1980 for her arrangement of “Birdland,” and continues to earn awards and accolades for her solo projects throughout her career.

Siegel has also been on a number of motion picture soundtracks (Swing Kids, A League of Their Own, Dick Tracy and others) and, in an age when buyers and sellers are quick to jam music and musicians into convenient little boxes, Siegel—either as a solo artist or in a group setting—has already built a career on defying preconceptions and stereotypes. Her most recent collaborations and projects are many and varied.

Siegel will be accompanied by Addison Frei on piano during tonight’s performance.