Biography
Cleveland native Laura Theodore has long combined jazz singing with blues, rock, and R&B sensibilities while also earning recognition as an actress for her stage depictions of Janis Joplin. Though her recording career in the 1990s and 2000s centered primarily on jazz, Theodore has never confined herself to that idiom alone; instead she has maintained an extensive performance history across rock, blues, R&B, cabaret, and traditional pop. Her recordings reflect this breadth of influences, which encompass Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Peggy Lee as well as Ruth Brown, Bette Midler, and Nancy Wilson—the pop and jazz vocalist, not the guitarist from Heart.
Raised in Cleveland, Theodore began performing in local theater productions while still a pre-adolescent. After high school she accepted a drama scholarship to Ohio University, yet she left before completing her studies to assemble a rock band and tour throughout the United States and Canada. Subsequent periods living in Denver and then Boston allowed her to study jazz composition at the South Shore Music Conservatory before she relocated to the New York metropolitan area. Throughout the 1990s she remained active in New York as both a jazz and rock vocalist and as a participant in numerous theatrical productions.
Onstage she has repeatedly embodied Janis Joplin, first in the off-Broadway musical Beehive and later in the play Love, Janis, where she collaborated with songwriter and producer Jerry Ragovoy, the writer of “Piece of My Heart,” “Cry Baby,” and other songs closely identified with Joplin. Another rock-oriented endeavor from that decade was the band Q, which Theodore co-founded with guitarist Larry Mitchell and which developed a modest cult following in New York. She has additionally recorded numerous jingles for television and radio commercials, among them campaigns for Jordache Jeans, Playdoh, and Nick at Night Television.
Theodore’s debut album, Tonight’s the Night, appeared on the independent Bearcat label in 1995. Later releases included Live at Vartan Jazz on the Vartan Jazz imprint, the more adult-contemporary-oriented We’re Only Human on Etherean Music, and What Is This Thing Called Jazz? again on Bearcat. In May 2003 she issued her fifth album, the self-produced What the World Needs Now Is Love, on Bearcat.
Raised in Cleveland, Theodore began performing in local theater productions while still a pre-adolescent. After high school she accepted a drama scholarship to Ohio University, yet she left before completing her studies to assemble a rock band and tour throughout the United States and Canada. Subsequent periods living in Denver and then Boston allowed her to study jazz composition at the South Shore Music Conservatory before she relocated to the New York metropolitan area. Throughout the 1990s she remained active in New York as both a jazz and rock vocalist and as a participant in numerous theatrical productions.
Onstage she has repeatedly embodied Janis Joplin, first in the off-Broadway musical Beehive and later in the play Love, Janis, where she collaborated with songwriter and producer Jerry Ragovoy, the writer of “Piece of My Heart,” “Cry Baby,” and other songs closely identified with Joplin. Another rock-oriented endeavor from that decade was the band Q, which Theodore co-founded with guitarist Larry Mitchell and which developed a modest cult following in New York. She has additionally recorded numerous jingles for television and radio commercials, among them campaigns for Jordache Jeans, Playdoh, and Nick at Night Television.
Theodore’s debut album, Tonight’s the Night, appeared on the independent Bearcat label in 1995. Later releases included Live at Vartan Jazz on the Vartan Jazz imprint, the more adult-contemporary-oriented We’re Only Human on Etherean Music, and What Is This Thing Called Jazz? again on Bearcat. In May 2003 she issued her fifth album, the self-produced What the World Needs Now Is Love, on Bearcat.
Albums
