Kellylee Evans: Jazz Singer, Songwriter and Motivational Speaker with an inspiring personal story!

In this episode we hear the incredible award-winning singer Kellylee Evans talk about her life and some of the challenges she has faced in her life, including two near-death experiences. She talks about her upbringing, her journey to jazz, her creative process, and much more. She is such a wonderfully engaging person, and I hope this episode will help listeners feel inspired by her story. We talk about her new album Greenlight and many of her other projects. Near the end of the episode at 43:00 we are gifted with an incredible a capella performance of one of the most-requested songs in her repertoire, Feelin' Good by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse.

All her current projects are here: http://www.kellyleeevans.com/

Like all my episodes, this is also a video, linked here to the transcript and bonus episodes:

https://www.leahroseman.com/episodes/e4s2kellyleeevans

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Kellylee Evans: “And then I was interested at that time in minority rights and representation and in legal philosophy. And so I was doing my masters of arts in law. My parents, their hope I think would've been just like most immigrant parents a lawyer, doctor, engineer. And I tried to... I wasn't trying that hard though to really be a lawyer. I really was hiding in school. My goal was to just keep my head down and stay here as long as possible. Because school is awesome, and if you figured out the path, if you know what to do, you attend, you finish the assignments, you hand them in. You do the reading, you get a mark, everybody's happy. That's something that's very doable, I think if you can just follow the script. But real life outside of school is scary. And the music industry, what's the path?”

This interview series follows my curiosity about fellow musicians: how did they get to where they are today, what are their perspectives on a life in music? The format is in-depth conversations prepared with lots of research and many episodes also feature the guests playing music. I speak to musicians playing in different styles of music, different instruments, and with really different careers. In Season One, I spoke with quite famous soloists like violinists James Ehnes and Kerson Leong, and also with erhu player Patty Chan and composers Hooshyar Khayam and Roddy Ellias about creativity, carnatic violinist Subhadra Vijaykumar about the Indianisation of the violin, violinist Alicia Svigals about the Klezmer revival, trumpet player Karen Donnelly about women in the brass world, and so much more, with 20 full episodes, and many bonus episodes. Season 2 has a similar diversity of guests, with many topics covered including personal struggles, the entrepreneurial aspects of the music business, advice on how to practice and how better to tap into creativity.

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Photo credit: Phantom Productions