About this Artist

Sultry and beautiful JANE MONHEIT, age 26, is already a jazz diva who ranks with the very best. From her emergence at the tender age of 20 at the 1998 Thelonious Monk Competition to the international acclaim that greeted her third solo album In The Sun, she has astonished listeners with the depth and range of her irresistible gifts: a deluxe voice and a passionate spirit spiked with an uncanny jazz sense that reinvents the great standards of American popular music.

Monheit wowed the jury of the 1998 Monk competition, which led to her immediately being signed for her first solo recording, Never Never Land. The album remained on the Billboard Jazz Chart for over a year, and the Jazz Journalists Association voted it Best Recording Debut. Her second album, Come Dream With M,e debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Jazz Chart in May 2001. Her third solo album, In the Sun, was released late last year.

A native of Long Island, Monheit numbers among her musical family an aunt and a grandmother who were both professional singers, a brother who plays rock guitar, a father who plays bluegrass banjo, and a mother who performed in musical theater. Monheit began formal vocal training at the age of 17 at New York's Manhattan School of Music with Peter Eldridge, a founding member of the vocal group New York Voices.

Monheit has been featured on two Sony jazz recordings, with Wynton Marsalis and violinist Mark O'Connor's Hot Swing Trio on In Full Swing and with jazz greats Diana Krall, Cassandra Wilson, and Dianne Reeves on Terence Blanchard's Let's Get Lost.