Avalon Jazz Bandis the ambassador of vocal French Swing in the United State sand the world. Created in New York in 2012, the band has performed at the most renowned venues in the city (Lincoln Center, The Iridium, Joe’s Pub, The Carlyle, The Rainbow Room...), sharing the stage with the likes ofNorah Jones, Harry Connick Jr. and Stéphane Wrembel, and touring internationally (United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland, Porto Rico, Fiji...)
Tatiana Eva-Marie was born into a family of professional musicians and quickly became obsessed with her father’s extensive jazz record collection, while also fascinated with the musical world of her Romanian mother. During her childhood, she performed regularly in various stage productions including guest star appearances in her father’s band The Cotton Club Jazz Orchestra. At 16 years old, she moved to Paris, where she studied medieval poetry at the Sorbonne University during the day, and performed as an actress and Gypsy singer in some of the most renowned cabarets and theaters in France, including the Comedie Francaise. In 2011, Tatiana moved to New York City, where she founded the Avalon Jazz Band and quickly set her American career in motion. She was recently acclaimed by the Wall Street Journal as “one of the best young singers around” and included in Vanity Fair’s list of rising jazz stars, alongside Cyrille Aimée, Jon Batiste and Cécile McLorin Salvant. Tatiana’s style is a direct tribute to her musical childhood, a mixture of her father’s Francophile jazzy influence and her mother’s Balkan heritage, through which she expresses her passion for poetry, rhythm, swing and the bohemian lifestyle.
The musical style presented by Avalon Jazz Band is inspired by the sort of jazz played in Paris in the 1930s and 40s, especially by the Hot Club de France. This style of hot jazz then became what we now know as «Gypsy jazz» or «Jazz Manouche», with its technical bravado and virtuoso skills, embodied by the quick fingers of Adrien Chevalier. The delicate voice and swing phrasing of Tatiana Eva-Marie brings the zazou element to the mix: an ingenuous and mischievous joie-de-vivre,which she incarnates to perfection. The zazous were young Parisians obsessed with American swing: their way of rebelling against the war was through dance and jazz (a forbidden music during the German occupation), displaying a very insolent kind of joy, which caused them to be marginalized and persecuted. The influence of the Russian aristocracy’s diaspora to France after the Russian Revolution and of the Jews fleeing Eastern Europe right before WWII, can be felt in the French compositions of the time. This element is also present in the music of Avalon Jazz Band, with a sound palette of Gypsy, Klezmer and Balkan inspiration.