Laurin Talese has been captivating audiences with her pure tone and poignant lyrics since childhood. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, she was classically trained at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Cleveland School of the Arts. She later studied classical and jazz voice at the University of the Arts, where she received a bachelor’s degree in vocal performance. Her debut album, Gorgeous Chaos, produced by Adam Blackstone and released in 2016, features a stellar line-up of musicians and was met with wide acclaim.

Ms. Talese’s talents have allowed her to travel around the globe, performing in a host of internationally renowned venues including the Newport Jazz Festival, Jazz at Lincoln Center Shanghai, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in 2018 when she won the seventh annual Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition.

In 2019 Ms. Talese represented the United States as a cultural ambassador with American Music Abroad, an initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and implemented by the Association of American Voices. Following in the footsteps of former ambassadors Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Dave Brubeck, the jazz and soul ensemble Laurin Talese and a Novel Idea embarked on a three-week tour of Montenegro, Ukraine, and Poland, performing and leading educational workshops to bring jazz to new populations. In 2020 she was awarded the New Jazz Works grant funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. In addition to an enriching role serving alongside fellow governors on the Recording Academy’s Philadelphia Chapter Board, Ms. Talese also enjoys working alongside fellow board members at Jazz Philadelphia. She made her Philadelphia Orchestra debut on its 2021 Martin Luther King, Jr., Tribute Concert on the Digital Stage this past January.