Roseanna Vitro

If you wanted to enumerate Vitro's credentials as a premier jazz vocalist, you could fill a tome as thick as Duke Ellington's songbook. The bible of jazz periodicals, Downbeat, named her three times as "talent deserving wider recognition." She's performed at the Kennedy Center, hit the top five in the Gavin Jazz Report charts and been a member of Lionel Hampton's band. Not content to rest at the top of her field, she adventurously tackles new challenges such releasing a tribute CD to pianist Bill Evans and taping concerts for Slovenian TV. She's known for using her contralto as an instrument to swing, scat, embellish and improvise in order to make a piece her own.