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Jessica is a musician with decades of experience in the Seattle and Pacific Northwest acoustic music community. She is an instrumentalist and vocalist who has performed with numerous combos that have played in a wide variety of venues, festivals and events including the The Seattle Art Museum, The Century Ballroom, The Pike Place Market's Pink Door, the Folklife Festival, The Moisture Festival, Seattle's Bastille Day, Djangofest Northwest, Port Townsend's Wooden Boat Festival...and well just too many darn venues and festivals to list here without boring you to tears! Suffice to say, she's played a heck of a lot and continues to perform around the Pacific Northwest with swing jazz ensembles.
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Jessica has contributed to a variety of recording projects, including three albums with her former project, Zazou. Most of her early recordings are unvailable because who knew that cassette tapes were going to become obsolete so quickly! Fortunately, her later work is widely available on streaming platforms. Zazou's last two albums are available on CD Baby, Bandcamp, Spotify, and Youtube Music. Click on the albums pictured to access these albums on Bandcamp. Sadly, Zazou's first album is out of print, so if you want one of the rare copies, you will have to bid on it at a Sotheby's auction someday.
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At a very young age, Jessica made her illustrious debut performing as a voice actor in radio commercials with her father. She also performed at parties and events as a mime with her mother. Of course, who doesn't? She studied violin in childhood until at age 14, she became too cool for that. At that point, she quit violin hand taught herself to play electric bass and guitar, and she started a band that played local gigs. She wrote and recorded her own music resulting in two albums that several relatives and friends might have in the back of a closet somewhere. Upon aquiring a stand up bass and moving to Seattle (those two things happened nearly simultaneously) at the end of her teen years, she became interested in traditional acoustic music styles. She hauled that string bass around to play at every possible opportunity and in doing so, played country blues, bluegrass, blues, jug band, swing, contra dances, and more. Finally, while living in France to study French language, culture and music, Jessica discovered the hot club style of swing jazz and chanson francaise that forms the foundation of her musical repertoire today.
