“Shiri Zorn is an innovative vocalist who inhabits her luminous soprano voice like a nightingale on the wing. She inhabits song lyrics and narratives as if they speak to her in the secret space of her heart”
~ Raul Da Gamba.
About Me:
Shiri Zorn is an innovative jazz vocalist whose fresh and intercultural sound reinvents standard jazz repertoire as we know it. She layers American Songbook tunes with Middle Eastern influences and unexpected time signatures, and reharmonizes Latin and Samba classics to evoke feelings of transcendence, temporarily rendering the listener lost to time and space.
“Zorn’s voice is cool, calm and cerebral, her tone pure. She articulates lyrics with perfect diction and scalpel-like precision.”
~ Allen Morrison, DownBeat Magazine
Vocalist Shiri Zorn’s pure tone and insightful phrasing nurtured at Israel’s leading school for the arts, Thelma Yelin, where she was first drawn to the music of Gershwin, Cleo Laine, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Carmen Mc Rae and subsequently at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, England, where she studied voice and piano.
From 2007–2011, Zorn lived and performed in Seattle, Washington, sharing the stage with some of the nation’s most renowned musicians, including Greta Matassa, Darin Clendenin, Chris Symer, and Beth Winter. Upon relocating to Upstate New York, Zorn sang and recorded with the influential musicians such as Peter O’Brien, drummer, and Ira Coleman, bassist, and began her decade-long collaboration with the ingenious guitarist and composer George Muscatello.
This partnership culminated in a 2022 lockdown album, Into Another Land, a debut that was vocally produced by Grammy nominated jazz vocalist Tierney Sutton, informed by the spontaneity of past Saratoga Springs performances with Muscatello, and underpinned by Brazilian percussionist Mauricio Zottarelli’s artistry. Steven Miller, from Sound In Review, describes the album this way: “Into Another Land offers a depth of listening. The unexpected is to be expected, and the profound is to be embraced. Each musician elaborates with precision and acumen, illuminating their given instrument to the fullest potent potential for a lasting impression.”
“Shiri is my favorite kind of singer (and human, for that matter)—open-minded, creative, and honest . . . . She has enough confidence to look at her own work and fine-tune it. . . . a wonderful, detached, honest idea of who she is.”
~ Tierney Sutton talking to Allen Morrison, DownBeat Magazine.
Zorn currently performs in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she is recording her second album, “Looking for the Light,” coming in winter 2025.
Photograph of Shiri Zorn by Terri-Lynn Pellegri
“When I first heard the great Cleo Laine, I was mesmerized by the intimacy and freedom of her interpretation, and I knew I wanted to experience that closeness of communication with my own audience. Jazz performance offers endless possibilities to create worlds within worlds, and it demands a letting go and deep listening with an open heart; my storytelling inspires audience members to experience the immediacy of unexpected, fragile resonances and find solace, acceptance, and connection.”
~ Shiri
“‘My name means ‘Sing!’ in Hebrew, the command form of the word,” [Zorn] said. “I don’t know how my parents knew, but they did,’”
~ Allen Morrison, DownBeat Magazine.