Grace Kelly

While a current Grace Kelly concert might delight jazz purists with Great American Songbook standards, it could just as easily inspire mainstream listeners with Gracei-fied takes on the likes of Daft Punk’s Get Lucky, Coldplay’s Magic or Sia’s Chandelier. In Dec 2015 Jon Batiste snagged Grace as a regular on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’s band, Stay Human, playing multiple reeds and singing. But whatever the style, the 23-year-old seven-time winner of the Downbeat critics poll (as a rising star in the alto sax category) spices up the sound with the lyrical and soulful phrasing of her instrument. For Kelly, who recorded her first album, Dreaming, when she was 12, evolution is part of the jazz artist’s credo. Drawn to jazz by melodic players like Stan Getz and Paul Desmond, Kelly also found in the music a freedom to express herself that she had not found in her classical piano lessons.\”I’m a very strong believer that jazz is about improvisation and about creating and spontaneity,\” Kelly once said in an interview. \”That’s what really drew me to it, but I think there’s plenty of music that can fuse elements of jazz withits own type of sound whether it’s rock or pop. I’m not into ‘No, this isn’t jazz.’ I like everything that’s good and I encourage people to think that way.\”