Born of English and Trinidadian parents (both talented singers), award-winning New York-based singer, composer, lyricist and Motema recording artist, Tessa Souter, has a distinctive and exotically beautiful style of jazz which evokes Spain, North Africa and the Middle East, as well as the Celtic folk music she grew up hearing.

"There's no one doing what Tessa does," enthused author and critic Will Friedwald, when she began singing in New York. "One of the most imaginatively programmed vocal sets of recent memory" said the Los Angeles Times, in a rave review of her California debut in 2002. "The best thing is that Souter sounds different," said the Philadelphia Inquirer of her most recent release, Obsession.

Her distinctive sound has evolved naturally from the disparate musical styles she absorbed throughout her life, from Carmen Jones to Captain Beefheart and Sandy Denny to Sarah Vaughan. And she cites her biggest jazz influences as instrumentalists, specifically Miles Davis ("... for how he used silence as much as the notes.") and Wayne Shorter, whose Native Dancer album featuring Milton Nascimento was her introduction to jazz. "If I were only allowed to listen to one album for the rest of my life, that's the one I would choose," she says. "Every time I listen to it, I hear something new."

In her relatively short career she has recorded and or performed with some of the world's top jazz musicians, including Steve Kuhn, Joe Locke, Gary Versace, David Finck, Kenny Werner, Ron McLure, Billy Drummond, Gene Bertoncini, Lew Soloff, Santi Debriano, Joel Frahm, John Hart, Essiet Essiet, Jay Leonhart, Marvin Sewell, Romero Lubambo, Gwilym Simcock, Nikki Iles, Asaf Sirkis, Winston Clifford, Lekan Babalola, legendary tuba player Howard Johnson, Joe La Barbera, and LA based guitarist Larry Koonse who says: "Tessa has all the qualities I most admire in a musician: great time, beautiful phrasing, gorgeous sound, a respect for silence, an emotional connection to the moment and a wonderful ability to tell a story. She is the 'real thing' in every way."

But the journey to becoming a professional musician now living in New York, the "capital of jazz" has been a long and circuitous one.

Tessa studied piano from eight to 12, when (after hearing her sing) her piano teacher encouraged her to focus on singing instead. She then taught herself to play guitar by ear, performing throughout her early teens and dreaming of becoming a professional singer one day. But when she had a baby at 16, along with a short-lived marriage, she devoted herself to her son and put those performing hopes on hold. "My son was my music," she says. "Everything I did from then on had to fit around him."

After catching up on O and A levels and subsequently graduating from London University with a BA (Honors) in English Literature, she fell into a career as a journalist in the UK. Then she interviewed one of her journalist heroes, famed editor Stefan Lorant (then 98 and in London to pick up a Lifetime Achievement Award for Services to Photojournalism from Harold Evans). Lorant invited her to visit him in Massachusetts.

While in the US she decided to also visit an old friend in San Francisco - and stayed, initially juggling cleaning houses with penning articles on everything from San Francisco homelessness to travel, to celebrity interviews, freelancing for the London Times, Independent, Guardian, Elle, Vogue, the Sydney Morning Herald and other international press. "Rushing back from the Grand Marriott Hotel, where I'd just interviewed movie director Mario Van Peebles for Elle magazine, to change out of my one nice dress, which my roommates had clubbed together and bought for me, to clean someone's house felt particularly surreal," she remembers.

In 1994 she became one of the founding members of the now famous literary haunt, the Writer's Grotto (which Entertainment Weekly magazine has called "one of the few solid literary communities outside the media centers of New York and LA") at its original location on Market Street. It was there, up the road at the Mint Karaoke Bar, that she first sang in public, on a dare.

That one song started a chain of events which led to Tessa's move to New York, where she began sitting in on jam sessions, before winning a scholarship to Manhattan School of Music, which she left after one semester to learn her craft "on the job". She had her first professional gig in Greenwich Village, in February 1999, and was later invited by jazz vocal legend Mark Murphy to run his workshops in exchange for mentorship. She did it for four years. "It was an absolute labor of love and a giant privilege," she says, of the experience. Murphy says of Tessa, "She is a true musician, extraordinary and very moving, completely captivating her audiences."

Since 2004 she has recorded four CDs, including Listen Love (Nara, 2004), Nights of Key Largo (Venus, 2008), which won Swing Journal's coveted Gold Disc award, and Obsession (Motema, 2009). Her latest recording, Beyond the Blue (Venus, 2011), featuring Steve Kuhn, David Finck, Billy Drummond, Joe Locke, Joel Frahm and Gary Versace, has just been released in Japan.

A riveting live performer, she's inspired standing ovations from Minsk to Moscow, and New York to Siberia, headlining to packed houses from New York's Dizzy's Club Coca Cola, Blue Note, Joe's Pub, Jazz Standard, Tribeca Performing Arts Center and the Kitano, to London's Pizza Express, Dean Street, Pizza on the Park, Ronnie Scott's and beyond.

To quote a review [in the Rochester City Paper of her triumphant return to the Rochester International Jazz Festival 2009]: "To say that Souter enchanted the audience would be an understatement .... The capacity crowd seemed to be transfixed by Souter's gorgeous voice and wonderful personality."