THRU A GRAY FILTER
With her stunning musicality and warm, enveloping voice, Texas native Kellye Gray is one of the most accomplished jazz vocalists on the national scene. Over her twenty-year career, Gray’s profile has continued to grow by leaps and bounds, recording a half-dozen albums as a leader and logging performances nationally and internationally at world-class venues and festivals includ...ing Lincoln Center, the Spoleto Festival, Yoshi’s and SFJAZZ. She has been side by side onstage with legends Ray Charles, Dizzy Gillespie, Etta James and Arnett Cobb.
Gray recorded her 2007 CD live at Berkeley’s Jazzschool with a formidable trio including pianist Otmaro Ruiz and fiery Cuban drummer Jimmy Branly. Her debut, "Standards In Gray" broke her into the mainstream. All of her titles garnered critical acclaim. She promotes her organic ‘voice as instrument’ brand developed through years of live performance and taking chances. A natural singer, self-taught since childhood. Her early years spent as an improvisational comic actor and stand-up laid the groundwork for scat singing and instrument simulation. That, along with her dad's record collection and the popular exposure of jazz on television and radio- her gods. A child of the 60's the education she received from comics, singers, musicians and entertainers coupled with her southern exposure to gospel, cajun, r&b, blues and soul shows up in every note she sings. A bandleader, soloist, singer, entertainer. Kellye Gray makes it her own every time.

The new release, And, They Call Us Cowboys (the Texas Music Project (grr8 Records), re-imagines the timeless and diverse music of the Lone Star State through the filter of Gray’s jazz sensibility.

Jazztimes says, "think of a layer cake with a dense Carmen McRae center, iced with swoops, dollops and occasionally wide swatches of Nancy Wilson and Billie Holiday, then dotted with Etta James bluesiness and Tina Turner wail. Gray’s is an impressive, indeed frighteningly vast talent".