Overview

These days she’s fostering a passion for the electric bass and producing electronic music, but vocalist Annie Sellick is most known for twenty-five years of fronting jazz trios. She is known by everyone for her unique and undeniable stage presence, and an ability to use repertoire to share personal authenticity, and connect with the band members as well as everyone in the room.  “She doesn’t just sing, she swings, tells stories, shares her heart and celebrates simultaneously” (CDBaby fan post). An accomplished bandleader, she made her living for most of those years by honing relationships with jazz musicians in the areas she toured and traveling to them, sending arrangements in advance, rehearsing them at soundcheck and fleshing out the rest of the show by calling jazz standards and cuing style treatments that would feature the strengths of the musicians on her stage.  Her seasoned sense of rhythm, swing and phrasing makes obvious that she can (and has) hang with some of the top names in jazz.  She’s also had a life in gypsy swing and big band jazz orchestras, and performed with several known groups in those genres ,as well as lead her own. She’s released eight albums under her own label.

Accolades

"...Annie Sellick has the most pleasing standards voice I've heard in a long time." - Tom Hull, The Village Voice

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Recordings

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Personnel

Annie has toured, performed shows and/or recorded with Joey DeFrancesco Trio, Mark O’Connor’s Hot Swing, Gerald Clayton Trio, Tommy Emmanuel, Shelly Berg, Jeff Hamilton Trio, Tamir Hendleman, Bela Fleck, Jeff Coffin’s Mutet, Akira Tana, Taylor Eigsti, Bruce Forman, Howard Alden, Eddie Higgins Trio, Quentin Baxter, Chester Thompson, Josho Stephan, Stephane Wremble, , Beegie Adair, David Hazeltine, Grant Stewart Quartet, John DiMartino, Essiet Okon Essiet, Victor Jones, Kevin Bales, Paul Keller, Eddie Metz Jr., Chuck Berghofer

Beginnings

One evening in a “dive bar” near the college she attended in Middle Tennessee, Annie sat in with guitarist Roland Gresham (Sr.) and his band.  Having little background in music study or exposure to jazz, the only tunes she recognized were “Fever” and “Somewhere over the rainbow” which she delivered with such sincere personality and lyrical interpretation that it brought the house down and the band hired her on the spot to encourage her.  She recalls getting the names of jazz singers, writing them down on her hand, tracking down their albums, learning the tunes a few at a time and returning to the club to decipher a key before the show and then get up and sing them, quickly using her hear to navigate intros, endings, solos and improvisational cues.  This weekly gig inspired her to hone her craft by attending classes at the Nashville Jazz Workshop where she became their first work-study and developed the skills to confidently assemble her own bands.  She returned to her hometown of Nashville, TN where news about this charismatic, pixie-faced young jazz singer with long dread-locks spread like wildfire, a unique addition to Music City’s country-music-soaked climate.  Garnering a lot of media attention in Nashville including five consecutive “Best Jazz Artist”awards by readers on the Nashville Scene and having the top-selling local artist album at Tower Records for an amazing two-year stretch, she started catching the eye of jazz industry professionals and it’s players, quickly taking her work beyond Nashville to Los Angeles, New York, Montreal, Europe, Japan, etc…