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CALVERT AND COMPANY is a Greenville-based jazz and blues band featuring vocalist Jean Calvert doing standards from both genres.  Calvert's voice has been compared to Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, June Christy, and contemporarily to Diana Krall and Jane Monheit.  She can be swingingly hot or sultry-cool.  Having begun performing at the age of 3, Calvert is a well-seasoned singer with an extensive and diverse repertoire because of her background in church music, school chorus music, folk music on solo guitar, country music, R&B, as well as jazz and blues.  She is just as at home on the big stage as she is in intimate settings, making the band perfect for small rooms and private parties, concerts and festivals, corporate events, and as an opening act in big halls.  Her impeccable delivery is not  manufactured through sound editing; it is natural and reproducible in any setting.

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL My love of music began before I was born. I floated in the womb of a woman who loved to sing and was constantly humming a tune, sometimes so low I could only hear every third note, but still I could name that tune. It was at the ripe old age of 3 that I began performing in church. I very much wanted people to believe that I could read, so I would hold the hymnal as if I were reading. Little did I know I was holding it upside-down -- a dead give-away! At the end of every church service, I would make a bee-line for the piano, and there I would sit and pick out songs while my parents worked through the line to greet the minister. People often ask me when it all started. I was 4, and was mesmerized by Betty Boop who sang and danced, and lived in New York City; by Darla on The Little Rascals; and by Little Shirley Temple. I said to myself, "I can do that," and seeds were planted. There was always music around me while I was growing up in the Duncan Park neighborhood in Spartanburg, South Carolina -- at home, at church, at school. My mom was a seamstress, and she always had the radio going, humming along as the sewing machine whirred. It was Monty Dupuy hosting a show that played the 1940's, 1950's and 1960's standards that I now love so well. When I was 10, my father brought home our first hi-fi. With my school lunch money, I bought my first 45 -- BIG GIRLS DON'T CRY by the Four Seasons. After that, I began spending all my lunch money on 45's. And my dad was a country music fan who introduced me to Hank Williams Sr., Patsy Cline, and Jim Reeves. He helped train my memory for lyrics by offering me $5 if I could listen to Jim Reeves' HE'LL HAVE TO GO one time and remember all the words. I got that $5, and still remember every word. That same year, my younger brother got a Sears Silvertone flat top guitar for Christmas. But he was an outdoors boy, and when it turned spring, he was gone, and the guitar was forgotten. I borrowed a Peter, Paul and Mary song book with chord diagrams and photos of fingering techniques, and that summer, I secluded myself and practiced until my fingers developed blisters, and the blisters developed calluses. My first two songs were THE CRUEL WAR and 500 MILES. It would be several years before I got my own classical guitar (nylon strings are easier on the fingers!). For years, I was a closet guitar player. None of my school mates knew I played guitar and sang every day. But when I went to Columbia College, I met a group of women who had a folk music group called THE LADY BUGS, and I learned more about guitar, and reacquainted myself with performing. I was doing covers of the greats -- Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins (whom I later met at a party in New York City), Simon and Garfunkel (also a New York City connection there), James Taylor, Carole King. Although I was majoring in English and minoring in creative writing, I spent a lot of time on music. It was also at Columbia College that Dr. Butler, my esteemed philosophy professor, introduced me to Dave Brubeck's TAKE FIVE, in a class on existentialism, and I was a "gone cat," off into a world of jazz that continues to this day. I had my first paid solo gig in Greenville right where Addy's stands now. The restaurant was called GENTLEMAN JIM'S, and it had great food and atmosphere. I remember former Mayor Max Heller used to come in, and he'd always request that Jim Croce song, TIME IN A BOTTLE. In 1977, at the urging of my dear friend, Sam Dillard, I attended Pratt Institute School of Art and Design in New York City, where I resided until 1991. Sam's sister Peggy had gone to Pratt. I was majoring in graphic design and minoring in art history, but still spent a lot of time in jazz clubs in Greenwich Village, hearing living legends up close and talking with them. I saw Carmen McCrae and Nancy Wilson at The Blue Note, met Dizzy Gillespie at Fat Tuesdays, Kenny Barron at The Star and Garter, Manhattan Transfer at Radio City Music Hall. In New York, I also signed up for guitar classes at The Guitar Study Center, a studio owned by Ed Simon, Paul Simon's brother, and at the end of the course, had a vocal workshop with Art Garfunkel. Although I loved folk music, I also found myself wanting to sing the jazz standards, so I went to The Harbor View Cafe, a restaurant right under The Brooklyn Bridge, where Sir Robin Clark befriended me. He had played piano with the likes of Duke Ellington and Count Basie in his younger days. He was kind enough to let me sit in with him. That led me to sing at several other clubs where I honed my jazz vocal skills. Then in February of 1991, when I returned to South Carolina, one of the first things I did was put together a jazz trio called RSVP. We were successful from the outset, and found an audience hungry to hear jazz standards. I've kept at it for sixteen years now, and still love it just as much, maybe even more. Some singers I've been compared to are Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Anita O'Day, June Christy, Carmen McCrae, Diana Krall, and Jane Monheit. It's no wonder -- these were my role models. I've listened to them over and over, taking a little from each one, and finally arriving at my own style. My commitment to jazz goes to performance, education, preservation, and ultimately expansion of the jazz audience. How wonderful to see a renewed interest in and the revival of jazz!   View the Jean Calvert and Company Slideshow

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