Liane Carroll

Born on 9 February 1964 in London, England, the pianist grew up between Hastings, East Sussex, and south London, taking up formal keyboard studies at three. Memories from those early years feature her parents’ singing alongside recordings of jazz, soul and current pop. Original composition began at eight. At fifteen she entered the jazz/funk outfit Gemini as keyboardist and occasional vocalist, drawing on a wide range of rock influences at the time. After leaving school she performed with assorted groups, sharpening both her stagecraft and writing technique. Piano engagements at Eastbourne’s Grand Hotel included weekend vocals with the resident dance band.

During the late eighties membership in Trevor Watts’ Moiré Music Drum Orchestra brought travel to India, New Zealand, Canada and the USA. Further band work came with Dave Holdsworth, Gerry Rafferty, Jerry Donohue, Long John Baldry and others, while steady session duties enhanced her standing. She assembled her own trio featuring bassist Roger Carey, whom she met and married in the mid-eighties, and the group issued recordings on Jazz Art, Bridge and Ronnie Scott’s Jazz House.

From 1996 to 2002 she collaborated with singer-songwriter-guitarist Peter Kitley on numerous songs. Their joint charity single for deprived Brazilian street children included backing vocals by Paul McCartney. Additional colleagues included bassists Steve Lamb and Colin Gibson and drummers Greg Leppard, Dave Trigwell and Dave Mattocks; the 2006 trio retained Carey and added drummer Mark Fletcher. Association with Hospital Records began in 1996, and in 2003 she joined an international touring band assembled by label founder Tony Colman for the Brazilian Electro Dance Music Festival in Brasilia. Early in the new millennium she started recording for Splash Point, producing a sequence of acclaimed albums that merged jazz, R&B and the singer-songwriter tradition. In 2005 she chose to concentrate on jazz, becoming that midsummer the first artist to receive two BBC jazz awards in a single year—Jazz Vocalist Of The Year and Best Of Jazz. The following year brought the Marston’s Pedigree British Jazz Award for Vocalist Of The Year. In addition to performing she teaches at jazz summer schools in the UK and Europe and leads workshops.