Sophie Milman closed the 2011 festival with Matt Dusk at the Homburg Theatre. A Sunday night finale, two of the country's best known young jazz singers on one stage. The show was presented by the Confederation Bridge Concert Series.
She was twenty-eight that year, still in her twenties, as every profile of her seemed compelled to point out. She had been touring and recording for less than a decade. In that time she had released four albums, won a JUNO, and been named a New York Times critics' choice. The trajectory was steep.
The road to Toronto
Milman was born in Ufa, in the Soviet Union, in 1983. Her father collected jazz records on the black market, bartering for Ella Fitzgerald and Ray Charles and Oscar Peterson LPs that were not supposed to be in the country. The family left for Israel in 1990, when she was seven. She has said the move was disorienting, but Israel gave her another language and a wider musical palette. She sang in a children's television show there. Then, at fifteen, the family moved again. This time to Toronto.
She arrived in 1999 with little English. Music became the way in. A high school music teacher gave her a solo in a school concert about a month after she landed, and from that point on she lived from one music night to the next . She studied commerce at the University of Toronto, writing essays on red-eye flights and in tour vans, because the music was already taking over .
The JUNO and the voice
Her 2008 album, Make Someone Happy, won the JUNO for Vocal Jazz Album of the Year. It topped the iTunes jazz charts in Canada and the US and made the top five on Billboard's jazz chart. The reviews were the kind that follow a singer for the rest of their career. JazzTimes called her "Canada's hottest young jazz singer." DownBeat said she "captivates." The Los Angeles Times wrote that "the sky's the limit for this exceptional young talent" .
What made her stand out was not the repertoire. She was singing standards, mostly, though she had a habit of slipping in unexpected choices. The Beatles' "Till There Was You," a French version of a Gainsbourg song, a Kermit the Frog number that she made her own . It was the voice. A husky alto that could move from a whisper to something bigger without losing the thread. The LA Times described her as "one of a kind," noting the quirk in her vibrato and the way she juxtaposed soft and loud phrases, turning what other singers might smooth out into part of her style .
That night
The Homburg Theatre is the big room at Confederation Centre. Proper stage, proper sound, a Sunday night crowd that had been at the festival all week. A shared bill with Dusk, two singers with different approaches. Dusk is the showman, the big band, the Rat Pack lineage. Milman is quieter, more interior, the kind of singer who draws you in rather than bowls you over. Put them together and you get a finale that covers both ends of the spectrum.
She was touring In the Moonlight around then, an album recorded in New York with Larry Grenadier, Lewis Nash, Randy Brecker, and Chris Potter. The review in CBC around that time noted that she was not playing it safe, avoiding the obvious Songbook choices, and that she sounded like "a sax" in the way she moved through a melody . A Sunday night in Charlottetown, a full theatre, a singer at the top of her game. That is the version of Sophie Milman the festival got.
Since then
Milman kept going. She released more music, toured widely, and eventually lent her voice to Yiddish Glory, a project of lost songs from World War II that earned her a Grammy nomination . She is still based in Toronto, still singing, still one of the most distinctive voices this country has produced.
For the current festival, head to the schedule page or the main lineup page. This archive is kept for looking back.