THE FUTURE, AT LEAST AS FAR as jazz goes, is coming on fast. Last year, the Montreux Jazz Festival presented elder statesman jazz icon Quincy Jones with a lifetime achievement award. Asked what he thinks of the future of music, Jones answered, “How many of you have heard of Nikki Yanofsky? She’s the future of music.” Indeed, Yanofsky is already a star in her native Canada, where her megahit performance of the anthem, “I Believe,” at the 2010 Winter Olympics, propelled her into celebrity status. She tours the world, performing in top-tier jazz festivals and in concert at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and The Kennedy Center; she has released two CDs – one a tribute to her guiding light Ella Fitzgerald and the other a multifaceted CD of mostly originals, produced by the legendary Phil Ramone; as well as a DVD of a live performance, which was nominated for two Canadian Juno awards. She’s sung on TV before an audience of 3.2 billion viewers, and live before 100,000 as headliner of the Montreal Jazz Festival.Oh, and did we mention that she’s only 16 years old? Yanofsky began performing professionally at 12. She was short, pudgy, and had braces on her teeth, and she was also ebullient and had the ability to emulate Ella Fitzgerald’s scatting with jaw-dropping, almost freakish precision and speed.She’s in the 11th grade in her native Montreal, and, despite all her successes, she tells The Report that she won’t really concentrate on developing her career till she finishes high school because her parents, who lead her management team, insist that her talent and her professional career be nurtured along, and that their daughter be allowed the normal life of a teenager.Well, at least relatively normal.YANOFSKY IS PETITE, DELICATE and lovely. On stage, she displays the control and poise of a seasoned veteran. One is tempted to think she must have been through professional polishing, that her patter is programmed and her every gesture planned. But then she opens her mouth and candor and guileless enthusiasm reveal her as she is – a remarkably talented, sweet, charming teenager sitting on top of the world, just a little dizzy from her fortune and success, without any trace of Lolitastyle pandering.The Report caught up with Yanofsky poolside at the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Eilat in late summer. At first, she brings to mind the image of an over-affectionate, heartbreakingly cute puppydog, jumping and panting and tripping over itself and in an overabundance of exuberance – a healthy, enthusiastic, sincere and teenagery 16-year old.One moment she sounds as slick and polished as a seasoned pro who’s spent years on the road; and then she tells a story so artless and candid that the innocent little girl shines through. “When I was a kid,” she says – referring to a concert in 2008 – she had to focus on a love object in order to perform a particularly intimate romantic song. So she thought about the family dog.Describing an original song, the almostwoman says, “This is actually one of my favorite songs ever written. I’m just lucky it belongs to me.” Then, with a bit of a wink and a hint of a blush, she continues, “I cowrote this next song. I am pleased to announce the debut of my first love song.” Suddenly, she says, “I’m sorry, I need to take off these heels. I’m new to them. I’ll try to do it as gracefully as possible.” She holds on to the mike stand as she switches into comfortable flats – totally awkward, completely charming and fully disarming.She chatters at that speed that is unique to teenage girls, talking about shopping and studies and friends. And about international stardom, too.On this trip she’s brought her friend Rochelle with her, halfway around the world from their Montreal homes. “She just got back from camp, so I just grabbed her and said, ‘Come on, you’re taking a week off to come with me.’ It’s just not as much fun going shopping alone, right?” On stage, she has tremendous personal charm, and the audience loves her. She walks on with all the assurance of a veteran, calling on the audience to join in clapping from the first verse she sings. The band is oh-so-tight, a bit slick, the best that money can buy. She chatters with the audience with aplomb. “Ma shlomekh? I don’t know what that means, I just like talking Hebrew. Thank you! Toda raba!” YET FOR ALL HER UNDISGUISED teenagerness, Yanofsky is a remarkably mature singer, whose work is not based merely on intuition or raw talent. Her phrasing is impeccable, her poise thoroughly professional, and her vocal control very developed. In addition to all her personal charm, and perhaps in contrast with her disarming personal candor, she’s a highly technical singer. “I started out as all intuitive. I discovered Ella [Fitzgerald] when I was really little and studied her records like crazy. I copied her, and she was a very technical singer. I didn’t realize that I was copying not only the sound but also the technique, because in order to extract a certain sound you also need to copy the technique. It was only two years ago that I started getting vocal training.” She makes the “two years” sound like a very short time ago – until you remember that two years ago, she was 14 years old. “My teacher has extended my range by two octaves. I’ve really been learning how to develop my voice, when to place things in my head, in my nose, when to blend a head voice and a chest voice, how to get really high notes. Now I can hit the highest note in The Magic Flute,” she giggles proudly. “Opera is great practice. And how to control my voice. Like now [after a transatlantic flight, the afternoon before a big show] I’m talking off my vocal cords. “And musical theory, that’s really cool. Stuff that I knew from listening, now I’m learning the name for it.” Yanofsky knows her stuff and she’s attending to her singing with the utmost “academic” seriousness. She listens to current pop albums on the radio, and her main influences in pop music are classic rock (“Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder are probably my favorite musicians alive. Michael Jackson. John Legend, John Mayer”). These influences are evident in her concert repertoire – “This next song is by The Eagles; it’s the first concert I ever went to” – which includes a mix of her favorite pop songs, originals from her new CD, and standards from the Great American Songbook, especially Ella Fitzgerald. This 11th grader has done her homework and it shows. She provides knowledgeable, thoughtful takes on a wide range of vocalists. Ella? “How did someone with such a terrible childhood have such a sunny disposition? Life gives you lemons, make lemonade. She’s inspired me. Without her, I wouldn’t be who I am.” Sinatra? “I like his early stuff. He gave a lot to jazz. If you ask someone who’s not really immersed in jazz who they like, they’ll say Sinatra.” That’s a very tactful, mature jazz singer’s take on Old Blue Eyes. You can’t dismiss him, but you show that you understand his artistic limitations. YANOFSKY ATTENDED A Solomon Schechter day school in Montreal. “She knows how to conduct a Seder,” attests her father, who first visited Israel as a tennis player in an International Student Games tournament. It’s the first time in Israel for Yanofsky and her mother, so they’re making a family vacation out of it. “I really have a special feeling of belonging, and I only just landed,” she says, when asked about being in Israel. “All my friends say that when they come here. I’m lucky that I’m getting to see so many different places at such a young age. It’s enlightening.” What’s it like being a celebrity? “I don’t really get that I am. People recognize me, especially in Canada, and say, ‘Oh, that’s that Yanofsky girl,’ but for me I’m still the same person. It doesn’t really sink in that I’m famous. I never cared about being a star. Even when I was younger, I never said, ‘I want to be famous.’ I said, ‘I want to be a singer.’’ On stage, she was clearly enjoying herself tremendously. I thought of all the 16-year-old wannabe stars in the world diva-ing at their bedroom mirrors. Yanofsky was doing the same thing. Just in front of a live audience. I came away convinced. She’s the real thing. You seem to be enjoying yourself, I say to her. “Let me tell you a story. Last summer we were touring Europe, and I bumped into Quincy [Jones] in our hotel in Rotterdam at midnight. I went up to him, and we chatted till 2:30 in the morning. He invited us to Montreux in Geneva (what Quincy calls ‘the Rolls-Royce of festivals’). I got to practice with the best musicians in the world. It really inspired me. I was keeping up, but they had so much knowledge and experience, I really wanted to get to that level. I talked to Quincy about it. He said, ‘You know the saying, ‘I know theory, but not enough to hurt my swing’? Well, that isn’t true. You study theory, you’ll learn from it, it’ll help you.’” Yanofsky has her own steady band, so playing with the best improvisational musicians in the world was a new experience. “We had one hour to practice. They picked it up, and added their own stuff, and it was perfect. Yanofsky is famous for her Ella-styled scat singing, which is vocal improvisation using nonsense syllables over a jazz standard, sort of an instrumental solo using the voice. But the framework is known in advance, as opposed to true improvisation, in which there’s no predetermined basis to lean on. “So at Montreux, on stage. I sang my three songs, and it was great. Later, Herbie Hancock closed the show playing ‘Watermelon Man’ on the keytar [a keyboard held like a guitar]. He’s my favorite piano player alive today, I’m a hyoooj fan. So I’m standing in the wings, and I saw Quincy, so I went up to him and said ‘Thank you so much for having me here, it’s unreal.’ And he looks at me and says, ‘The microphone is on. Go.’ And he pushes me onstage. And I’m turning around, saying ‘What do you want me to do??’ Herbie is soloing away, I don’t want to step on his toes. And he says, ‘Just scat, scat.’ So the break comes, and I go ‘Watermelon Man, dah dah dah’ and start my scatting, and Herbie looks up and sees me, and I’m going like ‘oh God oh God oh God,’ and he comes over, and I’m backing up, thinking ‘Please stay where you are!’ and he’s leaning against me, and we’re like jamming. He’d play something and I’d copy it, and then I’d sing something and he’d copy that, trading eights, and it was unbelievable! Afterwards, my dad was joking with me, saying, ‘What were you doing on your Friday night?’ and I was like on Cloud 10.” So what’s next? “Well, first I have to finish high school. That’s at the end of this year. Then I suppose I’ll move to New York to focus on my career full-time.” What sort of musical direction does she see for herself? “I get categorized as a jazz singer, but ‘I Believe’ was very successful, and that’s certainly not jazz. I don’t feel a need to put a label on music – jazz, pop, rock. I listen to everything, and I’m influenced by it. When I’m co-writing, I play my collaborator my last song and say, ‘That ends here, so now let’s take that somewhere else.’ So maybe I’ll try to do something like ‘Abby Road,’ where each song has something to do with the next, different parts each telling a story, and somehow they all go together. But I kind of change my mind every day.”
