San Francisco Bay Area Jazz Hero
A San Francisco Bay Area native, Laurie Antonioli is an esteemed educator, bandleader, and recording artist who has nurtured a generation of singers in Europe and California. She’s played a central role in the Bay Area’s emergence as a hotbed for jazz vocalists in the 21st century as both a private teacher and as the head of the Vocal Jazz Studies program at Berkeley’s California Jazz Conservatory, the nation’s first independent, accredited school devoted solely to jazz.
Antonioli brought to the CJC many of the concepts and programs she developed in Europe. It was a recommendation from her old mentor Mark Murphy that led KUG University in Austria to hire Antonioli as a professor for the vocal jazz department in 2002. Founded by Sheila Jordan, the prestigious program has featured a succession of vocal masters, including Jordan, Murphy, Andy Bey and Jay Clayton. After a four-year stint in Graz, Antonioli returned to the Bay Area in 2006 and over the next 17 years turned the CJC into a thriving forum for vocal experimentation. Programming workshops and intensives by artists such as Kate McGarry, Theo Bleckman and Becca Stevens, and courses by resident masters, Antonioli nurtured a disparate array of singers who are now well on their way as professional musicians.
Antonioli started playing guitar and writing songs as a teenager in the early 1970s, inspired by the era’s definitive singer/songwriters, particularly Joni Mitchell. She caught the jazz bug listening to her grandmother’s 78s of Nellie Lutcher, the jazz pianist and vocalist whose sassy style resulted in numerous R&B hits in the mid-1940s. Her jazz investigations led her to Billie Holiday, who inspired Antonioli to start singing standards and improvising.
During her two years in Mt. Hood Community College’s pioneering jazz vocal program in Portland, Oregon, Antonioli started absorbing the seminal recordings of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Lee Morgan. Just as importantly, she soaked up musical wisdom in person listening to the brilliant vocalist Nancy King. Back in the Bay Area at age 21, Laurie had a chance to put her rapidly maturing scat chops to work when Mark Murphy started inviting her to sit in at his weekly gig at The Dock, a music spot in Tiburon. New Orleans-born saxophonist Pony Poindexter, a commanding bebop improviser, deft vocalist and dedicated entertainer, provided Antonioli with invaluable bandstand training and insight into the jazz life. He had cultivated an avid following in Europe and in 1980 recruited the then-22-year-old singer to join him on for an extensive European tour that turned into an eight-month sojourn.
She recorded Soul Eyes, her debut album for Catero Records, a ravishing duo session with piano great George Cables (the title track features Mal Waldron’s lyrics for his oft-played standard, which he gave her after hearing her sing in Munich) in 1985. Throughout the next decade, she was one of the region’s most visible singers, booked at leading venues and festivals with her own band, performing regularly with Bobby McFerrin and sitting in with luminaries like Tete Montoliu, Jon Hendricks and Cedar Walton at Keystone Korner. She forged particularly close ties with Joe Henderson, a creative relationship that lasted some two decades until his death in 2001.
Even before she recorded the Joni Mitchell project Songs of Shadow, Songs of Light Antonioli had created riveting jazz by delving into her Yugoslav heritage. Her second album, 2004’s Foreign Affair, is a bracing blend of post-bop jazz and Balkan music created with players from Serbia, Albania, Germany and the US. A collaboration with bassist and composer Nenad Vasilic, the project draws on her Montenegrin roots, an interest ignited by the Eastern European music she heard while living in Austria.
Since retiring from the CJC last year, she continues to teach privately. Known as a generous mentor who maintains an international network of singers and players, Laurie Antonioli continues to serve as a binding force behind the scenes, a Jazz Hero of song.
— Andy GIlbert
JJA board member
San Jose Mercury News, SF Chronicle,
San Francisco Classical Voice, Berkeleyside.com,
