Kristiana Roemer Quintett

Kristiana Roemer (Singing, Comp., Arr.)

• Béla Meinberg (piano)
• Matt Adomeit (bass)
• Jordan Dinsdale (drums)
• Oren Levanon (guitar)

“Kristiana Roemer's voice has a combination of softness and firmness which conveys both strength and sensitivity. Her songs have a haunting, wistful feel which perfectly matches her sound. Her band here is fine at being either ethereal or swinging as the songs dictate.”

All About Jazz, 3/27/2021

Roemer was born as the daughter of an American mother and a German father in a bilingual household in Frankfurt. Her mother made clear the importance of integrating her American culture with her German culture by attending an English-speaking church and making long summer visits to North Dakota. Music has been an important part of Roemer’s life from the beginning. At the age of six, she began taking piano lessons and then began singing in church and with a traveling choir. Her first attempts to write songs took place at the age of nine.

Roemer took classical singing lessons as a teenager, when she met a professional pianist who invited her to sing popular melodies and standards with him in a local lounge, and they soon began performing together on a regular basis. Roemer decided to continue her musical education and received a one-year scholarship at Concordia College in Minnesota before returning to Germany to take care of her mother, who fell ill and died soon after.

During this time, Roemer had enrolled for her Bachelor of Science at the University of Frankfurt, but the impulse soon took her to Paris, where she performed regularly in cabarets and clubs for three years and studied jam sessions and jazz singing at the conservatory and completed her science studies abroad. There she founded a quartet and began to perform her original compositions. She fell in love with the city on a summer trip to New York.

Although Paris had been instrumental in solidifying her love and pursuit of jazz, the openness of the New York scene allowed Romans to spread their musical wings and provided the breeding ground for defining her musical voice. Roemer moved to New York and immediately immersed himself in the jazz scene there, performing regularly at the Rockwood Music Hall, Jazz at Kitano Hotel and Cornelia St. She graduated from Queens College with her Master of Music in Jazz Studies.

THE PROGRAMME The original tracks on this stylistically diverse and exploratory album were chosen with the intention of taking the listener on a special journey where a story is told directly and honestly. They are compositions that have been created over a longer period of time, from her time in Paris to her stay in New York. Many of the lyrics, both their own and those of others, were originally written as lyrics.

Roemer moved to New York and immediately immersed himself in the jazz scene there, performing regularly at the Rockwood Music Hall, Jazz at Kitano Hotel and Cornelia St. She graduated from Queens College with her Master of Music in Jazz Studies. Roemer deliberately incorporates the German language into her music, as it is not often used in contemporary jazz. She manages to weave these linguistic influences in a natural and appealing way.