Kim Nalley

Kim Nalley was born in 1969 and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, in a musical family; her great-grandmother taught her piano. She moved to the Bay Area in the late 1980s, studied history at UC Berkeley and sang in the Cal Big Band, and turned to jazz around then. A weekly gig at the Alta Plaza got her noticed by Michael Tilson Thomas, who recorded her and booked her for a Gershwin program with the San Francisco Symphony. She fronted the Johnny Nocturne Band, reaching No. 12 on the Gavin chart and touring widely, and appeared at Teatro ZinZanni as Madame Zinzanni. After a couple of years in Switzerland she came back to run Jazz at Pearl's, the North Beach club, from 2003 to 2008.

Her albums as leader: Need My Sugar (2002), She Put a Spell on Me: Kim Nalley Sings Nina Simone (2006), Ballads for Billie (2006), Christmas Time Is Here (2010) and Blues People (2015).

Nalley's Bands of the Bay page, captured in August 2008, listed her as a San Francisco act under Blues and Jazz with a band of Tammy Hall, Dave Mathews, Michael Zisman, Kent Bryson, Josh Workman, Greg Skaff and Allen Smith. The bio talked up the range, from operatic top notes down to gritty blues, and named Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald among her influences, with Bugs Bunny thrown in. Twenty-two votes had rated the page 6.2, enough to keep her on the site's highest-rated list. Her own description of the sound: "If Jessica Rabbit were crossed with Louis Armstrong."