Longwood Debut
Creating music that combines jazz with pop and the dance rhythms of the Caribbean, Cyrille Aimée has developed a remarkable, multi-award-winning, Grammy-nominated, continent-spanning career as a singer, songwriter, lyricist, and educator—while always remaining true to her roots.
For Aimée, music is a way of life as much as an art form, setting her free to pursue her creative talents wherever the promptings of her diverse heritage take her. She grew up in a multilingual household full of music where dancing was an everyday activity, soundtracked by the Afro-Caribbean rhythms of the bachata and merengue from her mother’s native Dominican Republic. Their family home was in Samois-sur-Seine, France—the location of the Django Reinhardt Festival, one of the biggest annual gatherings of gypsy musicians in Europe. The teenage Aimée would climb out of her bedroom window at night to mingle with the players, igniting a passion for jazz, and inspiring her with the idea of living within a global community of music, united in creativity and spontaneity, without limits or borders.
By the time Aimée was 20, she had already lived on four different continents. A spell in Santo Domingo was followed by a move to New York City, attending SUNY Purchase by day and moonlighting as a singer in the Manhattan jazz clubs by night. Her talents quickly gained her a reputation among her peers as a fearless, warm, witty improviser and a matchless interpreter of song: she performed and recorded with Roy Hargrove, stole the show in front of the notoriously hard-to-please crowd at the Harlem Apollo, and won a string of competitions culminating in First Prize at the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition.
A contract with Mack Avenue Records, the home of many of the US premier league jazz artists, resulted in two highly acclaimed albums which attracted the attention of one of the premier league songwriters—Steven Sondheim. The musical theater icon invited her to star alongside the legendary Bernadette Peters in an Encores Special Presentation tribute at New York’s City Centre in November 2013, backed by Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra, which was hailed by the New York Daily News as “a revelation.” Her 2019 album Move On featured versions of Sondheim’s songs which received praise from Sondheim himself, and one of its songs, Marry Me a Little, was nominated for a 2019 Grammy Award. Starting in 2020, she reached out into the digital realm via a string of YouTube video collabs with the pianist and jazz influencer Emmet Cohen, and their version of La Vie en Rose has been viewed more than 6 million times to date.
At the height of her New York success, new horizons beckoned. A growing interest in sharing her vision of the interaction of spontaneity and creativity, and the importance of community, led to her developing her ideas into a TEDx Talk about the laws of improvisation and how they apply to life. A visit to New Orleans resulted in her falling in love with the city and moving there in 2017. New Orleans’ unique mix of Latin, French, and African-American Jazz heritage allowed her to fully explore all the sides of her own musical identity, freeing her to look beyond the constrictions of genre and to engage with her own inner creativity.
Energized and unstoppable, in 2021 she bought a plot of land in the forests of Costa Rica, then designed and built a house on it. There, in the calm of the forest, she started putting together material for a new project—songs drawn from her own life, encompassing every aspect of her journey so far. Linking back to New York to connect all the dots, she teamed up with producer/multi-instrumentalist Jake Sherman, and together they have created her latest album, à Fleur de Peau. It’s a set of songs that show a new side to Aimée’s persona: one that encompasses her love of storytelling, truth, and musical freedom—drawing on all sides of her heritage. Combining the depth and sophistication of jazz, the immediacy of pop, and the irrepressible dance rhythms of the Caribbean, it’s at once more intimate and more accessible than anything Aimée has done before.
