Biography
Singer/songwriter Jen Chapin descends from the late folk-rock performer Harry Chapin, renowned for his 1974 hit "Cats in the Cradle." Her output diverges sharply from his folk-rock foundation, proving elusive to pin down since jazz, soul, funk, pop, and blues have shaped her sound alongside folk-rock. The New Yorker has cited listening preferences spanning Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan through Cassandra Wilson, Led Zeppelin, John Lee Hooker, and A Tribe Called Quest. Portions of her reflective, searching material lean toward jazzy folk-pop, while other tracks fit adult alternative or display pronounced R&B tendencies. Regardless of classification, Chapin stands distinctly apart. Yet she mirrors her father in two key ways by entering music professionally and championing social issues, above all the fight against global hunger. Born on Long Island in 1971, she spent her formative years in the New York City suburbs. At age ten she lost her father in a July 16, 1981, automobile crash on the Long Island Expressway when he was thirty-eight. In 1989 the eighteen-year-old departed Long Island for Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. During her studies she journeyed to Zimbabwe and Mexico for international-relations coursework before completing her degree in the subject. Around that period she committed fully to music, declining a teaching master’s program to relocate to Boston and enroll at Berklee College of Music. Although she had sung since childhood, immersion at Berklee—where she explored improvisation and jazz harmony—represented her first deliberate self-identification as a musician. After returning to the New York region in 1995, Chapin began teaching a course she created, “The History of Black Music,” at a Brooklyn high school while also establishing herself on the Manhattan club circuit, frequently alongside jazz bassist Stephan Crump. She issued a self-titled EP on her Purple Chair Music imprint in 1997, followed by the full-length Live at the Bitter End in 1999 and the 2001 duet project Open Wide with Crump, both on the same label. Outside music, she chairs the board of World Hunger Year (WHY), the nonprofit her father helped establish in 1975.
Albums
