Rhoda Scott: A Jazz Legend

With the album release of "Soul Sisters", we felt it necessary to offer the biography of a magnificent artist who has been featured on this album: Rhoda Scott.
Rhoda Scott, is an organist and American jazz singer born July 3, 1938, to Dorothy in the State of New Jersey.
After passing from the prestigious Manhattan School Of Music, she studied at the Conservatoire de Fontainebleau (France) with Nadia Boulanger. Rhoda Scott combines traditional skills with a great talent for jazz and religious music.
The Ambassador of the Hammond organ has enthused a large audience around the world for forty years. She has played with the biggest and the best of jazz including Ray Charles, George Benson, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Morrow.
Nicknamed "The Barefoot Lady" (the Barefoot Organist), Rhoda Scott was discovered by Count Basie and he immediately urged her to join his club in Harlem. It is there that Eddie Barclay and his partner Raoul Saint-Yves, always on the lookout for new talent, offered her to come to Paris, where they engaged her to perform in his tavern, the Bilboquet, from July 1968.
She married Raoul Saint-Yves, a former actor and singer (aka Raoul singing waiter), on October 3, 1969 at the American Church in Paris .
Rhoda Scott has played, including at the Olympia, as part of a singing tour of Gilbert Becaud the early '70s, then recorded a concert soon after in that music hall, accompanied by Joe Thomas(flute / tenor sax) and Cees Kranenburg Jr. (drums).
Rhoda has a full talent makes it so comfortable in classical music in the jazz, gospel or the blues. Gifted with an exceptional musical memory, for example, she knows more than a thousand songs by heart and she made most of his repertoire. Besides, she never needed an evening program and plays by the inspiration of the moment and especially by the public reaction.
It creates, at the Vienna Festival 2004, "Lady Quartet. WithSophie Alour (tenor saxophone), Bilberry Besson (flugelhorn) andLisa Cat-Berro (alto saxophone) and Julie Saury (drums), she turns in jazz clubs and record an album January 21, 2008 in"Sunset" (60 rue des Lombards, Paris).
Rhoda Scott loves France and owns property in Orne Coulonges to the Sablon, near Nogent-le-Rotrou (28), where she resides periodically.
In 2009, she joined La Velle, another phenomenon of jazz, for a special concert in Paris at the Meridien Lionel Hampton Jazz Club which will be recorded and published under the title "Soul Sisters Come Together In Paris".