Solitaire Miles…the name has a ring to it, echoing with loneliness and distance...it sounds too good to be true, but look on her birth certificate and you’ll see it’s the real thing: Solitaire Miles. Listen to her sing and you’ll hear the real thing, too. 

 

Considering the ancestry of hipness she needed to get a name like that, you won’t be surprised to learn that Solitaire comes from a swinging bloodline. Her grandmother Sybil Der Manuel was a big band vocalist in the early 1940's.  When Sol, aged three, heard her first Billie Holiday side, she thought she was hearing Grandma.  When Sybil played the piano and sang, young Sol would sit underneath next to the foot pedals for hours, drinking in the sounds of the past that would one day become her future.

 

For Solitaire, a jazz or swing number isn’t just source material to be pillaged for a contemporary pop recording. “I think a singer has to embrace the vocal style and phrasing from the era the tunes were written,” she says. So she’s absorbed the influences of giants like Holiday, Sullivan,  Ella Fitzgerald, Helen Ward, and Mildred Bailey. “I try to present tunes in the most authentic way possible, so that the listener is taken on a journey back in time to when the music was first performed, but I also try to confer originality and freshness to the lyrics and performance.  My songs aren’t just reproductions, but a unique illumination of melody and language.”   This approach has led her to become not only an interpreter, but an historian of her genre. “One of my favorite things to do is tofind forgotten songs from the 1930's and 40's and reincarnate them because this great music is a treasured part of ourAmerican musical heritage.”