I also received some very nice press from Chicago Jazz Magazine over the past few years, which has thus far been the most attention I have received from a jazz specific media outlet.  Below is a printed interview I did with Jeffers that will give you some more background about me - as well as a video of a live interview that I also did with him.  Both of these interviews were prior to the announcement of my performing at the Chicago Jazz Festival…

12.14.2016 | Chicago Jazz Magazine Interview

Jazz musician, vocalist and songwriter, Michele Thomas has a new group she will be debuting this weekend (December 16th & 17th) at Pete Miller's in Evanston called SoulMeme. We caught up with Thomas to learn more about how she got started in music, the different styles of music she loves that has helped to shape her sound and the new group she will be debuting this weekend.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: You have been performing around Chicago for many years but I think it would be interesting for our readers to learn more about where you grew up. Did you grow up in Chicago and were your parent’s musicians or into music?

Michele Thomas: I grew up on the west side of Chicago in the North Lawndale neighborhood.  Ogden Avenue was on one side of our block and Cermak Road was on the other side, and you could stand on the corner of Lawndale and Ogden and see clear through to the downtown skyline - the Sears Tower and everything...And my parents were definitely very musical. My dad was a preacher and loved to sing.  My mom learned to play piano from a young age and grew up playing and singing in church. They were big gospel music connoisseurs and in addition to a huge record collection they invested in both an upright Baldwin piano and a B-3 Hammond organ for our house - so their love of music was pretty serious. My mom in particular loved Sam Cooke and casually talked about how he often came through the local church scene and would sing at a lot of the black churches on the Westside.  She also had a secret love for Oscar Peterson, but had to keep it to herself as my dad was pretty religious and not down for playing that “devil’s music” in our house, which was hilarious.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Was there a specific artist or experience that influenced you and introduced you to jazz music?

Thomas: Funny enough, my earliest memory of jazz music kind of coming into my psyche was at 6 or 7 years old watching Mister Rogers Neighborhood.   I didn’t know I was listening to jazz or who Johnny Costa was but he and the trio backing up that show was everything!  I mean, how lucky were we as kids to hear that caliber of music on a children’s show?  But later on, when I got to high school, my jazz band director would give me my very first jazz album which was Ella Fitzgerald singing Gershwin songs that was arranged by Nelson Riddle.  She scatted over Lady Be Good and my mind was blown - so after that I was hooked.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: When did you decide, you wanted to make music your profession? Was there a specific performance that gave you the confidence that you could do it for a living?

Thomas: I’m very much an introvert so it took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I wanted to perform professionally, even though ironically enough I had been singing in front ofa lot of different audiences for most of my life and was studying music at a high school for the fine arts.  Plus, my dad in particular was not too keen on me getting into the “show business”, so I really had a hard time envisioning a viable path to a music career.  After high school, I didn’t get into university right away, so I took a year off and went part-time to Triton College out in River Grove, IL so I could figure out what I was doing.  There I met Shelley Yoelin and Rich Armandi who were heading up the jazz combos and jazz band there, and they got me involved and were really encouraging to me, and it helped me to feel like a career was a bit more of a possibility.  So that eventually led me to go to a university and study for a music degree.  Joe Lill who heads up the jazz program at North Park University was basically my mentor and showed me how to build a viable music career in the Chicago jazz scene.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: You have a new group called “Michele Thomas and SoulMeme” debuting at Pete Miller’s in Evanston December 16th & 17th. First tell us the significance/meaning of the name SoulMeme.

Thomas: We came up with the idea of SoulMeme as a way of describing our music and what drives it.  We think of memes that spread through our culture like pictures, symbols, phrases and even gestures.    Memes come into existence when message meets motion; and that’s a concept that I’ve pondered about a lot as it relates to the propagation of music, especially jazz.  My desire is that jazz doesn’t merely exist, but it continues to evolve, grow and instill its relevance into future generations in a spectral manner.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: How did the concept for the band come about and what repertoire will you be performing?

Thomas: The core members of our band actually go way back.  Darren Scorza, my husband and our drummer, Neal Alger our guitarist and Bob Lovecchio our bassist and I have played together for years.   And I think we’ve always been drawn together through the years because of a shared musical aesthetic and our fluidity between jazz and other genres.  So I knew these were the guys I would want to continue on the journey with as I wrote more original music and new arrangements.

We’ll be performing a mixture of contemporary and straight-ahead jazz, infused with a little gospel, r&b and sometimes funk. And we’ll cover some great arrangements by Joe Sample, Percy Mayfield, Abbey Lincoln, Luciana Souza, Billie Preston, Wayne Shorter, Maia Sharp, and Josef Myrow, as well as a few of my own originals sprinkled throughout the sets.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Who will be in the band at Pete Miller’s this Friday and Saturday night?

Thomas: This weekend I’ll be playing with some of our extended SoulMeme family of players who I also love and admire.…on Friday we’ll feature Darren Scorza on drums, Neal Alger on guitar and James Ross on bass.  And on Saturday we’ll feature Darren once again on drums, Jo Ann Daugherty on piano and Cory Biggerstaff on bass. 

Chicago Jazz Magazine: After this performance, what do you have coming up in the future?

Thomas: SoulMeme will be back at Pete Miller’s in January and we’re working towards more bookings in 2017.  But I’m also excited to premiering at the new Winter’s Jazz club in January.  We’ll be performing more of our classic and vintage jazz sets on that evening.  My hope is to put together a demo of original music later next year and work towards another album release going forth.

Mike Jeffers
Chicago Jazz Magazine 

2020 - 2021 | The COVID Pandemic

So after the world went into lockdown back in March of 2020, I, like most musicians was trying to figure out what my life would be now that my career and a big part of my livelihood had been upended.  What I found interesting and comforting was how much of the creative community at large was at the ready to adapt to the crazy new landscape of art and entertainment.  So I feel I had a lot of possible career highlights in 2020/2021…though mostly unconventional and unique, and even sometimes indirectly connected to my music career…

We jumped on the live streaming bandwagon almost immediately.  My husband has run a small project studio from our home for the better part of 15 years, and along with dabbling in video editing he was more than ready to take on the live streaming platform.  So we presented a dummer/vocal concert in lieu of my recording project which we jokingly named the “We Were Supposed To Be Recording But Now We’re Live Streaming!” House Concert.

Not long after that I was invited to be interviewed for a very unique podcast where I had a candid and heartfelt conversation with Andrea Klunder of “The Creative Imposter” about what my identity as an artist was now in the reality of a pandemic.

Also over the past couple of years of the pandemic, what actually kept me viable was teaching.  Both my husband and I are musicians, but we have also been music instructors for about the same length as our performance careers.  While my husband had been teaching for high schools and colleges for a while, I have been running my own music studio business for 16 years where I’m a vocal coach and mentor. Soulstream Music Studio  Plus I have freelanced as a clinician and vocal choir and ensemble director through the years.  So when I least expected it, I was recommended by my colleagues to come on board to teach at a couple of colleges in Chicago.  And as of 2020 I became the vocal jazz ensemble director at DePaul University which was a fairly brand new addition to their school of music.  And then I joined my husband at Vandercook College of Music teaching and creating online courses for music educators in the summer of 2021.

I had not for seen myself teaching music for colleges, especially in the middle of a pandemic.  But I’ve been serious about teaching music for most of my life, mainly because it’s been a gift of mine to do so, but also because it was healing for me to work through some of the bad experiences in my music training. (a whole other story) So it’s felt like the work I’ve done through the years has led to more exposure and opportunities to share my knowledge from some platforms of more authority which is nice.  In May, I was sought out to be on a panel with some other noted jazz musicians and educators for a online forum put on by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s series: “Soundpost: Beyond The Page”

I’ll also say that from a personal standpoint, one of my favorite and unexpected highlights of 2021 came as a result of teaching at DePaul University, because I was able to organize a couple of studio classes for my students where I interviewed two of the greatest jazz artists in our current history…Grammy award winning, Kurt Elling (whose one of my artistic heroes) and NEA Master Sheila Jordan (who was one of my artistic mentors)! I NEVER would have for seen doing that just a short year ago, so it was a really incredible experience for me!

The last couple of things that have happened this year are equally pretty amazing and unexpected, though they are kind of indirectly related to my music career.  But I was also interviewed as part of an upcoming documentary by a director named Luca Mercuri called “From West to East: The Return of An Interconnected Planet”.  And I recently gained an opportunity to be a music supervisor and have a walk-on role on the upcoming second season of “Southside” - a comedy series produced by Bashir Salahuddin and Diallo Riddle which will be premiering on HBO Max very soon.  I am also currently consulting as a vocal coach to their cast for one episode this season. (Update 11/15/21: the new season just premiered on HBO as of November 11th and I was invited to the screening here in Chicago…incredible!)

I know people try to act really cool about these kind of experiences, but I don’t!  These have been really exciting experiences for me, and I have no idea if any of this should be in my bio - but I’m telling you anyway just in case! Lol!

That’s about it.  My current bio is also below which was written years ago by a writer at Cyber Music PR, and I apologize that I have forgotten his name.  But he did a wonderful job.

Michele Thomas Bio - CURRENT

“(She) has her own vocal sound, which is beautiful by the Grace of God.”

— YUSEF LATEEF

About Michele Thomas

Michele Thomas is an American jazz musician, vocalist and songwriter from Chicago, IL. From growing up singing in church, to co-founding North Park University’s gospel choir, to performing and teaching in Scandinavia, and then carrying that skill back to her hometown, Michele Thomas and her talents have carried her through a fantastic array of experiences within the massive world that is, music. By combining her gospel background with her deep love of jazz and appreciation for contemporary soul and R&B, Michele has crafted a sound that doesn’t conform to one genre, but rather elegantly evokes the elements that make these genres so dynamic.

Michele’s life and career began and grew in Chicago, Illinois. Born the daughter of a Pentecostal preacher in the Church of God In Christ, Michele grew up on a steady diet of gospel music. The impact it had on her, even at a young age was profound. As she recalls:

“I remember as a little girl listening to a gospel record of Vanessa Bell Armstrong, holding the record jacket and just crying as I listened to her sing. Her voice made me want to be more in my life. Music can go deeper than just your surface emotion and actually change minds and hearts.”

These feelings, along with her innate talents, led to Michele arranging and conducting her church’s choir while she was still in her preteen years. Her continued cultivation of those skills rewarded her with a position in the Chicago All-City choir and a scholarship to the Sherwood Conservatory of Music. Ultimately this led to Michele attending the aforementioned North Park University, graduating with a B.A. in music, and establishing their gospel choir. Her contributions there have been acknowledged through the years and on the 15th anniversary of the choir’s founding she was invited back to perform with prominent gospel musician, Richard Smallwood.

Michele’s cultivation of the choir program caught the eyes of others and in 1996 and 1998, she was invited to Sweden to help teach and perform gospel music to her audiences. The educational aspect of her career continued on state side as for nearly a decade, Michele has been working at her own lesson studio, the Soulstream Music Studio of Contemporary Voice. Thanks to her work in conducting choirs and arranging vocal parts, even dating back to her childhood, Michele had essentially been teaching for most of her life, and the studio was just a continuation of that. By offering private lessons, Michele could really help bring out a singer’s individuality while also opening herself up to the community.

Community has always played a large part in Michele’s life, at church, at university, at home, and at her studio. Over the last several years, her studio has helped raise money for The Firehouse Community Arts Center, an organization on Chicago’s west side that offers creative arts programs to the youth. This kind of opportunity wasn’t available to Michele as a child, and due to numerous public school closings in that region of the city, many children would have even less opportunity than she did if not for this non-profit group.

As is so often the unfortunate case, one of the reasons why Michele has such a deep understanding and appreciation for community is because of the losses she’s suffered in her life, namely the deaths of her mother and older sister. Even something as tragic as death and loss can foster a feeling of togetherness, sometimes in unexpected ways. As Michele tells it:

“I was asked to sing a gospel hymn for a family who was in the waiting room of a hospital because their mother was dying and they needed some encouragement. The thing is, I was there because my mother was dying too, but I still sang for them. Situations like these have taught me to have reverence for my gift and know the catharsis that music can bring to people’s lives.”

Community is also what propelled Michele’s history of performance in the Chicago jazz club scene. A local tavern named Big Joe’s 2 & 6 Pub would host some jam sessions every Sunday night, and upon recommendation from a friend, Michele went on stage to sing with the band and cemented Big Joe’s as her regular haunt. Several years later, while attending a jazz workshop in Amherst, MA, Michele spoke with noted jazz singer Sheila Jordan, and asked her for advice on what a young singer could do to build success in Chicago. Sheila referred her to a place called the Green Mill and its owner, Dave. As it turns out, Dave and Big Joe knew each other very well and Dave had been trying to get Michele’s contact information from him for some time. A beautiful example of how even a large community can form a tightly knit family.

Michele’s performances, like her music itself, are deep and emotional. Not only does she blend the genres of jazz and soul together with elements of folk, but she uses her voice and songwriting to stir something

jazz and soul together with elements of folk, but she uses her voice and songwriting to stir something deeper within people, causing them to engage the lyric and the beat simultaneously. When you look at some of her favorite artists, you begin to see more clearly how her sound has developed. Michele has been compared to other powerful African-American singers such as Ella Fitzgerald, Dianne Reeves, Cassandra Wilson, and Anita Baker, but she also draws inspiration from Kurt Elling, James Taylor, and Sting.

In between all of her teaching, mentoring, and performing, Michele has found time to record two albums with the help of some of Chicago’s finest session musicians including her husband, Darren Scorza on drums and producing. Joining them are guitarist Neal Alger, bassist Bob Lovecchio, and Matt Nelson on piano. Her first album, I’ll Take Romance, was very well received with Asha Brodie of JazzReview.com stating:

“Indeed, if larks could record CDs, they'd sound like Michele. She has a style that is joyful and soulful, her love for jazz music emanates through her scats and song phrasing.”

Other musicians have taken note of Michele’s sound as well with Warner Bros. recording artist Kevin Mahogany saying, “Best singer by far! Great feeling! Great voice! I'm in love!” And Grammy award winning jazz artist Yusef Lateef commenting that, “(She) has her own vocal sound, which is beautiful by the Grace of God.”

Messenger is Michele’s most recent album and serves as a tribute to Stevie Wonder and the power of his music and songwriting. It also continues to display Michele’s talent for outfitting existing jazz instrumentals with original lyrics, paying homage to the composers and musicians she admires, while simultaneously displaying her vocal flare; take for example her rendition of Hal Galper’s“Triple Play.”

Whether in her studio, on stage in a jazz club, or in the recording booth, Michele Thomas brings an amazing level of energy, passion, and emotion to everything she does. The substance behind her songs not only can inspire you to move your head and tap your feet, but to think about the nature of what makes life such a wonderful and rewarding challenge. Music is a powerful force whether it draws inspiration from gospel or the shared human experience and Michele Thomas aims to channel that energy into your heart, mind, and soul.