A 19-year-old Canberra jazz singer is well on her way to success, with a scholarship and a place at the noted Eastman School of Music in upstate New York, reports arts editor HELEN MUSA.  

Matilda Lorenz leaves town in late July to settle into campus accommodation in Rochester, not far from the Canadian border, but not before she performs a gig blending traditional jazz sounds with fusion and soul, alongside four of Canberra’s most respected jazz instrumentalists, Lachlan Coventry, guitar; Chris Pound, bass; Luke Glanville, drums and John Mackey, saxophone.

Originally from Germany, Lorenz grew up in Germany and Austria, but came to Canberra when her mum, a social scientist, took a job at the ANU.

When I catch up with her at the School of Music coffee shop, it’s clear the excitement of being accepted into Eastman has not abated. The scholarship pays most of her tuition but she’ll have to pay the costs of living, she tells me, and the Bank of Mum will come in handy. 

This four-year degree will be her first and she describes her trajectory to getting the Eastman place as “a crazy story” that began when she grew up as a child listening to American jazz singer Sara Gazarek. 

“My mother was a jazz pianist so I was always surrounded by music… I didn’t play an instrument, but I was always singing and had good pitch.”

At age nine when visiting New York, her mum heard that Gazarek was performing at a jazz club and took her there.

“I remember it, I was speechless, I thought, this is what I want to do. Mum asked her if she did vocal lessons and she did.”

But geography meant that it never happened.

Meantime at age 11, Lorenz taught herself to play piano and read music, and, around the same age, living in Vienna, took jazz singing lessons from Austrian vocalist Deniz Malatyali, who taught her that emotional connection is the most important thing. 

At that stage she was singing mostly jazz standards, but she also liked Afro music, blues and anything that affected her rhythmically.

“My faves were Bye-Bye Blackbird and soul, mostly Aretha,” she says.

At the beginning of this year, she got tertiary offers from ANU and Berlin but, uncertain what to do, she emailed Gazarek for advice. A Zoom meeting followed, in which Gazarek said she should apply to Eastman, where she was heading up a new jazz vocal degree likely to be the best such course in the US, one with a new focus on creativity in singing.

“I missed the deadline but she put me straight through,” Lorenz says, adding that the subsequent audition involved singing but also talking for an hour. 

By this time, she was studying in the jazz stream at the ANU while playing gigs around town, where she found a “big sense of community” and had impressed the faculty, so when the word got round that she’d got a place at Eastman, they rallied.

Sax player and ANU School Music faculty member John Mackey says that when he first heard her he thought: “Wow, she’s got a real feeling for the music.”

“When I heard she’d got a scholarship to Eastman I thought it would be nice to send her off before she leaves and good for her profile to play with professionals,” he says.

Matilda Lorenz Quintet, Smith’s Alternative, Civic, June 17.