Susanne Abbuehl
“Jazz is my musical home, my harbour. […] I have a sea of references from listening, and this means a lot to me. […] My idea of jazz singing for myself is that by touching and modelling musical material in my own way I can show my personal approach.”
Swiss/Dutch singer and composer Susanne Abbuehl was born in Berne in 1970. She was drawn to music and language early on and began studying the harpsichord and composing her own songs as a child. At seventeen, she moved to Los Angeles, where she graduated from high school and started taking lessons in classical singing. She recalls: “That is where I became familiar with the Great American Songbook. I had listened to jazz as a child, because my father was a fan of Duke Ellington, Ella, Louis Armstrong. But it was in a passive way. I actively got into it when I was [...]
“Jazz is my musical home, my harbour. […] I have a sea of references from listening, and this means a lot to me. […] My idea of jazz singing for myself is that by touching and modelling musical material in my own way I can show my personal approach.”
Swiss/Dutch singer and composer Susanne Abbuehl was born in Berne in 1970. She was drawn to music and language early on and began studying the harpsichord and composing her own songs as a child. At seventeen, she moved to Los Angeles, where she graduated from high school and started taking lessons in classical singing. She recalls: “That is where I became familiar with the Great American Songbook. I had listened to jazz as a child, because my father was a fan of Duke Ellington, Ella, Louis Armstrong. But it was in a passive way. I actively got into it when I was in the US.”
Back in Europe, she took up professional education in jazz and classical voice at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, where she studied with Rachel Gould and the late Jeanne Lee (“my favourite voice in jazz became my teacher”). Abbuehl also studied North Indian classical vocal music in Amsterdam and Mumbai.
All her recordings for ECM have received wide critical acclaim internationally. Her debut, April, won an Edison Award (Dutch Grammy) in 2002. JazzThing said of her second, Compass: “It is tender, intimate music which gives priority to the poetry”. Her third ECM release, The Gift, featured Abbuehl’s settings of poems by Sara Teasdale, Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson. The most recent incarnation of her band consists of long-term musical partner, Dutch pianist Wolfert Brederode, along with Swiss flugelhornist Matthieu Michel and Finnish drummer Olavi Louhivuori.
The release of The Gift prompted John Kelman (All About Jazz) to write: “she has established herself as a singer of rare instincts and conceptual distinction […] Abbuehl's attention to the purity of every note, the articulation of every vowel and the absolute precision of every consonant […] make her a singer who impresses, not through superfluous virtuosity, but by the exact opposite: for Abbuehl, every single note counts”.
Susanne Abbuehl has been commissioned to compose for various settings, including work for radio, theatre and sound environments. She teaches at the music academies of Lucerne and Lausanne, Switzerland.
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