Curtis Stigers

Few jazz vocalists have travelled a more winding route than Curtis Stigers. Born in Hollywood in 1965, he grew up in Boise, Idaho, where he played in rock and blues bands as a teenager and studied clarinet and saxophone at high school. The decisive lessons, though, came from the jam sessions Gene Harris led at the Idanha Hotel. After school he moved to New York meaning to be a rock musician, yet he kept drifting into jazz clubs to sing and play saxophone instead.

The breakthrough arrived in the early 1990s with a debut album for Arista that achieved multi-platinum sales. Its single "I Wonder Why" reached No. 5 in the UK and No. 9 in the US in 1991, and the follow-up, "You're All That Matters to Me", climbed to No. 6 in Britain. His take on Nick Lowe's "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding" then featured on the soundtrack to The Bodyguard in 1992. Later he recorded for Concord Jazz and, in 2012, turned to country-flavoured material on Let's Go Out Tonight, with songs by Steve Earle, Richard Thompson and Hayes Carll.