Kendra Shank, a singer, composer, and leader of a band, has found her voice and found a wide audience since moving to New York City in 1995. She has been a unique singer since then. Her background as a folk singer and busker in Paris for many years sets her apart among the other contemporary female jazz singers. Shank was born in California in 1958 and raised by musically supportive parents. She is not related to Bud Shank, a West Coast alto saxophonist. Her father was a playwright and taught at the University of California. While her mother was an actress and singer, she was also a playwright. Shank was five years old when she made her stage debut in an opera at her university. Later, she studied guitar, oboe and painting. She also became interested in French culture and language. She lived mostly in the Northwest in the 1970s and 1980s, and graduated from the University of Washington in 1981. In between semesters at school, she went on extended tours of coffee houses around Paris, performing the songs of Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, and other American singer/songwriters for Parisians, and then came back to the Seattle area to perform songs by French songwriter/playwright Jacques Brel. By the early ’90s, having made a few trips to New York City, the jazz capital of the world, Shank sang backup for saxophonist Jim Pepper and pianist/singer/songwriter Bob Dorough. Shirley Horn, a pianist and singer who became close to Shank, arranged for Shank’s debut album to be recorded for Mapleshade Records. Afterglow, her 1992 debut album was released by Mapleshade and distributed by Mapleshade. Abbey Lincoln was another mentor for Shank, who provided her with a place to call home when she moved to New York. Shank moved from Seattle to New York City in 1997. Lincoln advised Shank to not limit her voice, her music or herself in any way. Shank is suited to play the guitar on “Blackberry Blossoms”, a bluegrass song, on Lincoln’s album “Over te Years”. After the release of Afterglow, Shank recorded Wish (1998) as well as Reflections (2000) for Mapleshade Records. Both were released on the Canadian-based Jazz Focus label. Shank and her booking agent were able to arrange a series for her that took her around the U.S.A. and Canada in the late ’90s. These included stops at prestigious jazz clubs such as the Blue Note in New York City, Blues Alley, Washington, D.C., or the Dakota in St. Paul, Minnesota. In the late 1990’s, she also formed a regular backup trio, which includes Frank Kimbrough, Dean Johnson, and Tony Moreno, on piano and bass. Shank began playing local gigs in Manhattan in the early 2000’s and then stayed home to record Spirit Free: Abbey Lincoln Songbook for Challenge Records in the Netherlands. This project had been four years in the making. Spirit Free was released in February 2007. Shank used her experience in theatre and folk singing to create new and compelling ways of telling stories in different ways. She’s received high praise from jazz critics for her recordings. However, she has yet to achieve stardom on a larger scale due to the nature of the music business and the popularity of jazz and blues, contemporary folk songs, and other forms of music such as rock.
