Kelley Johnson

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Voice

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Kelley Johnson teaches all current popular singing styles, musical theatre, and is a jazz specialist. She is also an internationally known jazz singer, a recording artist, and a jazz choir director who works with middle school, high school and adult jazz choirs as an adjudicator and coach. Kelley specializes in helping people find their natural singing voices and enjoys working with all kinds and levels of singers. Kelley believes that singing is an opportunity for personal fun and freedom of expression so she presents the material in an organic and positive way with room for mistakes and humor. She uses solfege, the Kodaly Method, with interested students in her lessons. Her certification in Somatic Voicework™and Estill Voice enhance and inform her own teaching style. Her mission is to guide each student toward singing in an effortless way that is empowering and will help you to make great music!

 

Kelley draws from years of traditional vocal training and her own professional experience in various microphone styles of singing as well as her certification in Somatic Voice, the LoVetri Method, a methodology that balances the body and voice for all styles of contemporary commercial music. Kelley also uses the piano to teach musicianship to students who are interested in learning about music for songwriting, sight singing, general music theory or jazz improvisation.

 

Kelley moved to Seattle in the late 80’s but soon burst onto the national and international jazz scene, garnering honors from Wynton Marsalis, Kennedy Center, Jazzweek, Lincoln Center, Jazzconnect, Jazz Education Journal, the U.S. State Dept’s Jazz Ambassadors program and many others.

 

She and her band have twice been selected by the U.S. State Department to tour as a Jazz Ambassador performing and teaching in Japan, Turkey, Croatia, Uzbekistan, China, Nicaragua, Honduras, Azerbaijan, Dominican Republic, Suriname, Panama, Russia and more. Kelley is the first-place winner of the 2003 International Jazzconnect Jazz Vocal Competition, has recorded “Live at Birdland” at the historic New York City club, and received the Jazz Education Journal’s “Blue Chip Jazz CD Awards” in 2004. Kelley is a singer, music educator, composer, arranger, lyricist, poet, and producer of four CD’s that are internationally distributed on her label, Sapphire Records – several of which have risen on the national jazz radio charts.

 

Kelley Johnson graduated Magna Cum Laude from the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music with an AA in Jazz Performance, and from the University of Washington with a BA in American Music History. She has been Conductor and Artistic Director of the Children’s Jazz Chorus at the Seattle Metropolitan Urban League. She is a past associate professor at Cornish College of the Arts and is currently on faculty at the Seattle Drum School in Georgetown and at Music Works Northwest in Bellevue.

 

You can catch Kelley locally at Tula’s in Belltown, Bake’s Place in Issaquah, or on one of her four internationally acclaimed recordings.

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