Cyrille Aimée

We’re thrilled to open our season with the delightful French-Dominican jazz singer Cyrille Aimée and her quartet, fresh from selling out an entire week’s residency at Birdland. A masterful interpreter of Hot Club style, standards, and contemporary jazz, this tri-lingual, smoky-voiced chanteuse is a dazzling performer who can hold an audience in the palm of her hand. With style, panache, humor, and charm, Cyrille is a joyful jazz artiste.

For Cyrille Aimée, music is a way of life as much as an art form, setting her free to pursue her creative talents wherever the promptings of her diverse heritage take her. She has developed a remarkable multi-award winning, continent-spanning career as a singer, songwriter, lyricist, and educator, while always remaining true to her roots. She grew up in a multilingual household full of music where dancing was an everyday activity, sound tracked by the Afro-Caribbean rhythms of the bachata and merengue from her mother’s native Dominican Republic. The family home was in Samois-sur-Seine, the location of the Django Reinhardt Festival, one of the biggest annual gatherings of gypsy musicians in Europe. The teenage Cyrille would climb out of her bedroom window at night to mingle with the players, igniting a passion for jazz, and inspiring her with the idea of living within a global community of music, united in creativity and spontaneity, without limits or borders. 

By the time Cyrille was 20, she had already lived on four different continents. A spell in Santo Domingo was followed by a move to New York City, attending SUNY Purchase by day and moonlighting as a singer in the Manhattan jazz clubs by night. Her talents quickly gained her a reputation among her peers as a fearless, warm, witty improviser and a matchless interpreter of song: she performed and recorded with Roy Hargrove, stole the show in front of the notoriously hard-to-please crowd at the Harlem Apollo, and won a string of competitions culminating in First Prize at the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition. A contract with Mack Avenue Records, the home of many of the US premier league jazz artists, resulted in two highly acclaimed albums which attracted the attention of one of the premier league songwriters - Steven Sondheim. The musical theatre icon invited her to star alongside the legendary Bernadette Peters in an Encores Special Presentation tribute at New York’s City Centre in November 2013, backed by Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra, which was hailed by the New York Daily News as “a revelation.”

Her 2019 album Move On featured versions of Sondheim’s songs which received praise from Sondheim himself, and one of its songs, "Marry Me a Little", was nominated for a 2019 Grammy Award. Starting in 2020, she reached out into the digital realm via a string of YouTube video collabs with the pianist and jazz influencer Emmet Cohen, and their version of ‘La Vie en Rose’ has been viewed more than 6 million times to date.