Roberta Donnay

Roberta Donnay was born and raised in Washington, D.C. area, started singing jazz at age 5, became a professional musician at age 16, and started touring at age 17 (in Europe) borrowing a guitar when she got to a town to play..
When she moved to the west coast, landing in San Francisco, she spent every night sitting in at the jazz clubs and putting together her new group.. Her first professional gig w/a jazz band was a six month stint w/Dick Oxtot's Golden Age Jazz Band, subbing for another singer. From there she sang with Tom Keats and His Tom Kats, and continued to earn acclaim for her own style of interpreting jazz standards and blues.
She studied latin jazz, voice, percussion and guitar with a myriad of teachers, mostly teaching herself with records and by going to hear other performers.
As a songwriter, she was writing poetry by age 8, and was composing songs same year she started playing guitar. Her songs were demoed and won her songwriting awards (American Song Festival). She decided to pursue this line of work full time.
Donnay formed a production company in 1985 called "Rainforest Productions" based on her ecological work and committment to saving the Rainforest. Percentage of all earnings from the record sales went to Rainforest causes.
Donnay's first CD "Catch The Wave" (original) was released in 1990, her CD release party was held at The Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. It was the first independent CD released in San Franisco area.
Ms. Donnay continued to sing jazz in hotels, festivals, and concerts while she concentrated on writing and developing style.
She worked with other bands and opened or was shared the stage on concerts with other artists including: Ernestine Anderson, Eric Burdon, Richie Cole, Dave Ellis, David Grisman, Dan Hicks, Jonny Lange, Huey Lewis, Eddie Money, Maria Muldaur, Roy Rogers, Booker T., Peter Welker, Lenny Williams, Mitch Woods, and Neil Young.
In 1998, Rainforest Records released "soul reverse", a collection of blues infused originals. 5 songs from this CD were picked up by Heavy Hitters Music and Donnay signed a publishing deal which led to her songs on TV.
Another song "Love Laid Its Hand On Me", co-written with Tony Johnson,
was featured in "Reservoirs Of Strength", an indie documentary film (Bravo).
Also in 1998, "One World", written for the United Nations' 50th Anniversary, was released as a single.
Rainforest Records released "Bohemian" in 2001. Donnay toured the U.S. with her guitar, joined by her band to CD release shows on the east coast and the pacific northwest.
By 2003 Donnay determined to go back to singing jazz. She was mentored by legendary jazz producer Orrin Keepnews, who encouraged her to record and in 2003 they started working on a project which would become Donnay's first standards jazz release "What's Your Story".
Rainforest Records released "Back Before The Why", 15 originals for film and TV in 2005.
Same year, Dan Hicks and The Hot Licks needed a new singer and Roberta Donnay joined the band, and became one of the "Lickettes".
"What's Your Story" was released on Pacific Coast Jazz in 2006.
Surfdog Records released "Tangled Tales" by Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks in 2009. Donnay is featured vocalist on this record.
Donnay continues to write for TV and film, work as a producer on other projects (including music supervision), tour her own jazz band, tour with Dan Hicks and The Hot Licks and sing, sing, sing!
- joy montana
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Quote from Orrin Keepnews:
At this specific point in my long professional life as a jazz record producer, I have chosen to limit my serious artistic involvements to only three performers. I am very pleased that one of them is the remarkable young singer you are learning something about at this time Roberta Donnay!
I have been producing jazz records for extremely close to fifty years by now, a statistic that would frighten me if not for two facts: I have enjoyed the work just about all of that time, and I have had the opportunity to collaborate with a great many valuable and enjoyable artists and thus to help support and advance some quite notable careers. This also means that I have pretty consistently faced the reality of making value judgements about talent. I won't claim not to have made some mistakes along the way, but for the most part I remain proud of my decisions, and pleased to emphatically note that for a great many years now I have not accepted producing assignments on any basis other than my own enthusiasm. I do not intend to change that policy, making Roberta one of a deliberately small group of my current personal artistic commitments.
I actually first met Roberta not as a singer but as a colleague. Although East Coast natives, we have both been living and working in San Francisco for quite some time, and have worked together for some time as members of the board of governors of the local chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. I became aware that, although enjoying success as a pop singer and producer, and as a songwriter with a substantial number of film and TV credits, Roberta felt increasingly driven to re-invent herself as the kind of artist she had initially wanted to be; a full-fledged jazz singer.
Having heard her, and becoming aware of the potential of her talent and of the depth of her drive in this particular direction, I became convinced not only that I could help her towards achieving her goal, but that I very much wanted to offer that help. (To move at a tangent for a moment, let me point out that, while the bulk of my producing efforts have been with instrumentalists Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, McCoy Tyner, Sonny Rollins, Wes Montgomery, Cannonball Adderley, Joe Henderson and Bobby Hutcherson are some of them I also have a certain track record with a variety of singers that includes Abbey Lincoln, Mark Murphy, Flora Purim, Wesla Whitfield.)
Roberta and I have been working hard for more than a year. I have sought to expose her to a great many influences (some of whom she was quite familiar with) and a wide variety of classic and recent material, believing that talent like hers combined with a thorough grounding in the art she is now exploring must have strong results.
We are at work on the careful construction of an album that will draw from a wide range of songs and singers. (If you listen carefully to examples of her current work, you might learn that she has paid proper attention to such as Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Nina Simone, Carmen McRae and many others. You will also learn that, like any truly valid performer, there is a lot that belongs entirely to herself including numbers in her repertoire that are her own compositions.)
~ Orrin Keepnews