Katie King

"I heard this record by Billie Holiday, and it stopped me in my tracks. It was like a voice from heaven speaking loud in my ears." A bit dramatic, perhaps. Just 11 years old at the time of this revelation, Katie King nonetheless believes this experience started her down the road to a career as a jazz singer. Subsequently, as a teenager in Eugene, Oregon, King started to listen to those other doyennes of jazz singing, Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan, and Ella Fitzgerald, as well as to sich lesser lights as Carly Simon and Joni Mitchell. But it was the purveyors of jazz music who go...