Featured in the December '09 ssue oif the "Feedback" music magazine. Now available at feedback@hotmail.com



"Weekly jazz at The Bay View Bar and Diner, Swansea, continues tonight with local rising star vocalist, Amy Sinha. Amy has just recorded an album - Heaven at Midnight. The disc includes a lovely version of Cheek to Cheek, and her treatment of the Peggy Lee favourite Fever is well worth hearing. Tonight, she will be accompanied by pianist Richard Metherel."



ALL THAT JAZZ

PERFECTLY crafted jazz standards like Stormy Weather, Fever and They Can't Take That Away From Me, are, despite their elegant demeanour, robust old birds. In their 60-odd year lifetime they have been tossed from crooner, to be-bopper to ageing rocker, to piano thumper, and they are still in pretty good shape. And though those great standards are an alluring temptation to every kind of singer who wants to leave his or her mark on them, it is hard to beat a vibrato-rich rendition by Sarah Vaughan, the twinkly-eyed Tony Bennett treatment, or Ella's toffee tones.

Swansea's Amy Sinha discovered the Great American Songbook from MGM musicals and Fred and Ginger movies. The films began a life-long love of those great songs and of those definitive interpretations for her. She says: "I love to hear Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, and Louis Armstrong sing those songs." Amy's feel for a carefully-weighted composition put across with subtlety shows in her singing style. Hers is a mature and sure-footed voice, that lets some fine music and some poetic words show off their natural bloom and blush. "With those songs I think the more you let the song speak for itself the more powerful it is," says Amy.
"The words are so wonderful and the melodies are so beautiful that they sell themselves."

Amy is a recent graduate of Leeds College of Music and her interest in jazz blossomed in her teens.
"When I was at Gorseinon College, at 16, I started to get into it. I was picked out as the jazz singer in the class."
She did have some competition for the mic though: "I was in the same music class as Katherine Jenkins. She has always had a beautiful voice. We knew she was going to be the one who became a star," says Amy.

Amy’s new album, Heaven at Midnight, featuring Dave Cottle at the keys and Alan Vaughan on bass, is out now. You can catch her at the Bay View, Swansea, on Friday, accompanied by Richard Metherel.