Cheryl Richards biography
“It can be hard to find new things to say in old songs, but after many years of singing the standards, some singers are still able to discover the secret of a song. Cheryl Richards is a shining example of a singer who has been able to prove the relevance of the standards for a modern audience. ”
photo: Brian Geltner
"If you love superb vocal jazz improvisation, you’ll fall in love with her high-energy talent right away."
"...Richards takes on the time-worn American songbook and finds a fresh and distinctive take on every track...Take note of her tonal gradations and rhythmic displacements and how elastic a very familiar melody can be, and you’ll want to take another spin, too."
Vocalist Cheryl Richards moved to New York City in 2000 and has been singing jazz and improvised music since 2002. She studied with the great jazz pianist and improviser Connie Crothers for more than 15 years.
In the last several years, she has performed at venues throughout New York including Café Bohemia, the 55 Bar, Downtown Music Gallery, the Stone, Greenwich Music House, Why Not Jazz Room, Cornelia Street Café, and Zeb’s in Manhattan as well as iBeam, Roulette, Galapagos Art Space, The Drawing Room, Mirror Teahouse, and Cafe Orwell in Brooklyn.
Her newest CD, Another Spring, was released on New Artists Records in 2022. If Not For You was released in 2015.
Cheryl began singing at age 11 when she joined the award-winning Seattle Girls’ Choir. With the choir she toured Europe, the United States, and Canada and participated in numerous choral festivals and competitions. She earned her BFA in music from Cornish College of the Arts and for many years, she primarily sang classical music. She is a co-founder of a Renaissance Vocal Quartet, Oriana, which performed at venues throughout the Pacific Northwest, recorded a CD of madrigals and Renaissance songs, and regularly participated in festivals including Bumbershoot and the Folklife Festival. She co-created and performed original music for a number of choreographers and dance companies, including Jeff Bickford Dance, and performed regularly at venues including On the Boards, the New City Theater, the Nippon Kan Theatre, and the Broadway Performance Hall in Seattle. She is a co-founder of the band Lionfish, which recorded a CD of original music and performed regularly throughout the Seattle area. She has also sung with Jay Clayton's New York-based Vocal Ensemble, Different Voices.
“She is fearless and concentrated, concise and loose, with a bell-like clarity and dream-perfect intonation… Her demonstration of standard intonation clears the way for free-ranging melodic explorations, bending, shading, so that you know when she chooses notes not found on the piano she’s doing it on purpose. And her restructuring of the melodies sets you down, the effect being that the lyrics tell another different story than the one you’ve become familiar with.”
