Bios

Emmaline

Emmaline (rhymes with clementine), a 22-year-old singer and songwriter, possesses a smoky, jazz-infused, genre-fluid voice. She’s admirable as much for the range of traditional sounds she draws upon as for her innovation, attitude, and sly humor. 

Her songs are bold in statement and soft in feel. Her flow supple and precise. She prides herself on being someone who has listened with deep intention to her heroes—Anita O’Day and Billie Holiday, Erykah Badu and D’Angelo—and has already learned to rise above questions of category with a healthy sense of musical identity and forethought.

“I consider myself a jazz singer,” she says. “I have been singing jazz my entire life. I studied it, and I think that there is a place for me in the jazz world. Whether my music is strictly jazz, I cannot say, and, in fact, would rather not. To me jazz is art, not a set of rules.”

Emmaline’s success speaks for itself: On her first U.S. tour in November 2019, she performed as the opening act for ten-time Grammy Award winner ​Chaka Khan​ at the ​New Jersey Performing Arts Center​. On her own, she has headlined sold-out shows at some of the country’s most notable jazz clubs, including The Jazz Standard​ (New York City), ​Scullers (Boston), ​Blues Alley​ (Washington, D.C.), ​The Jazz Kitchen​ (Indianapolis), and ​Keystone Korner​ (Baltimore). 

She has performed in a range of situations on stage and online—with big bands and orchestras, singing Jessie J’s “Domino” (à la Billie Holiday) for ​Postmodern Jukebox,​ and vocalizing “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing” with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. 

Her first official release—the six-song EP All My Sweetest Dreams​—came out in September 2019. The release turbo-charged the tempo of her career ascendancy. Her sophomore EP, Neccesity, was released October 2, 2020. 

The new album features a variety of musical styles and genres: from classic neo-soul to a psychedelic, futuristic arrangement of her favorite jazz standard, “You Don’t Know What Love Is.” 

Emmaline makes an even bolder statement with “Necessity,” the title track, by showing her vocal control and technique in a reflective guitar-and-vocal duo performance. Though acoustic ballads aren’t conventionally considered for title tracks, it’s clear she has no intention of doing anything by the books. 

“I wanted to flip the script with the Necessity EP and show myself and others that you don’t need to do things in a conventional or predictable way to achieve your dreams,” she says. “I self-produced the entire record by myself with my guitarist Ryan Mondak, recorded it in my home studio with my friends, and funded the whole record by myself. The process was completely organic and completely me. I’ve never felt more myself.” 

Emmaline hails from Anderson, Indiana—an hour northeast of Indianapolis—where she grew up in a musical family; her father, a jazz pianist, her mother, a journalist, and both siblings musicians. She credits the lack of distractions in what was a primarily rural environment for honing her focus.

“I think that kind of solitude, being out in the country, played a big part in my musical growth. From the time I was very young, we would sit at home in the evenings and play music or have these listening parties in our bonus room upstairs,” she recalls. “My dad had a record player, and the majority of what we listened to was mainly jazz: big band music and also solo artists like Chet Baker and Bill Evans, and R&B and soul, and more modern things like Brian McKnight and Lalah Hathaway and Erykah Badu.” 

Emmaline began violin lessons at age 4. “I’d always be so nervous and shy about going to my lessons. But when we were actually making music and working on how to actually play my instrument, it made me really excited and motivated to practice.” She still plays the violin but considers her interest in singing as the turning point that led to her career path. 

“I always loved to sing. I remember, I must’ve been about 8 years old, I asked my dad, ‘How can I become a better singer?’ He gave me this record by Take 6 with a cover of the Donny Hathaway song, ‘Some Day We’ll All Be Free,’ featuring Lalah Hathaway. He said, ‘Listen and learn how to sing the entire song exactly how they sing it—word for word, note for note—that’s where you should start.’ That was the first song I ever worked on all the way through. Even though I was just singing it to myself, I felt I had accomplished something very important, something I had never tried to do before.” 

After high school, she entered the ​University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, focusing first on violin performance, then commercial music production, and eventually settling into the jazz program. She began to develop her own songwriting skills. But her real-world experience and building her career online eventually proved more educational and valuable than what she was learning in the classroom. 

“Promoting myself as a musician on social media was something I was not taught in school. It was my own idea,” she says. “From the very beginning, when I decided to be a vocalist and a songwriter, I knew that I needed a fanbase if I wanted this to work. And so far, I have been able to do that by posting my music on Instagram and Facebook. People immediately started responding. It’s been very encouraging. My social media presence made it possible for me to create my first recording. I started a Kickstarter campaign for $25,000, which eventually received more than $41,000 from my fans, which gave me the ability to release my first EP independently.” 

The process of creating Necessity was quite different. Emmaline and her crew recorded the entire album in two days at her newly built home studio in Cincinnati during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“We had to roll with the punches and adapt to the circumstances. I’d been wanting to transition into recording primarily from my home for a while, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to take that step,” she says. “The whole recording process just felt right. The instrumentalists on the Necessity EP​ are all musicians in my touring band. We’ve been playing together for around two and a half years now. We’re all great friends too, which made the recording process even more special.” 

The band includes Emmaline’s long-time friends and colleagues: guitarist and studio engineer Mondak​, keyboardist ​Dev Marvelous​, saxophonist ​Chelsea Baratz​, bassist ​Sam Reuscher​, and drummer ​Isaiah Cook​. Emmaline’s vocals and violin can be heard throughout the four-song recording. 

Emmaline regards jazz as an invitation to both honor the pioneers and help move the genre forward with new sounds and influences, all while being conscious of how the question of jazz identity can be a dividing point among players, critics, and listeners. 

“Jazz is not only bebop. It’s not only swing. It’s all of that, and also what is happening today,” she says. “Among people in my age group, the opinion on this really varies. But personally, I think this whole playlist and streaming culture today is awesome because people can listen—and they are listening—to all of it, to things they never would get to if they didn’t have access. Because of this, the music is evolving and something new, and creative, and extremely musical is coming out of that.”

Visit Emmaline to learn more.