Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, vocalist Aimée (pronounced emAY, or M.A.) Allen’s intimate connection with music began as a child. Her childhood was scored with classic jazz, because her mother kept selections from the tradition on the family turntable.

Though singing was a part of her childhood, Aimée first began singing professionally with jazz a cappella groups in college. After graduation, Aimée moved to Paris where she performed regularly in jazz clubs and festivals.

The deep relationship between the francophone audiences and Brazilian bossa nova, led Aimée to form Les Bossa Novices, a Paris-based group dedicated to bossa and jazz.

​Aimée now performs regularly in New York City and abroad, having toured in France, Italy, Russia, and Senegal. Standards and bossa are part of her repertoire, but now an accomplished songwriter, she also sings her original compositions, many of which have become audience favorites.

Her original music has been licensed for feature film and network television and she has sung with many renowned musicians including Romero Lubambo, Ron McClure, François Moutin, Rozwell Rudd, Ari Hoenig, and Yomo Toro and More.

Aimée Allen’s latest release, Love and the Catalyst presents her striking original music alongside a few diverse, yet familiar selections form the jazz cannon.

The songs address change and the catalytic agents that bring it about. Transformation, large and small, personal and collective, social and scientific, is the them, with the alchemy of romance explored through the surprisingly sensual metaphors of science and the cosmos.

1. Little Sunflower
2. Earth is Waiting
3. Quantum Entanglements
4. Crystal Silence / 500 Miles High
5. Star Eyes
6. Love’s Crescendo
7. Reaction Time
8. Mortally Immortal (Requiem)
9. The Comet’s Tail
10. Man Ripples Through Time
11. Hidden Place
12. Worlds Collide

Opening on her beautifully encased and effectively joyous rendition of Little Sunflower and then the Japanese-infused stillness and musical intricacies within Earth is Waiting and they are then in turn followed by the playfully organic rhythms and melodies of Quantum Entanglements, Allen’s achingly heartfelt tribute to Chick Corea on two golden 1970s period tracks (Crystal Silence / 500 Miles High) and then comes the quietly modified Star Eyes and the late night jazz bar, lush ambiance of Love’s Crescendo.

Up next is the furtively buoyant Reaction Time and the sterner, albeit still elegantly crafted Mortally Immortal (Requiem) - which also revisits Mozart’s Requiem as a jazz-infused mass for those lost to Covid - Allen returning to her more free flowing and pleasingly filled with jazzy blues hipsway ways on The Comet’s Tail, then comes the atmospheric storytelling of Man Ripples Through Time, the album rounding out on the melodiously mid-tempo Hidden Place, coming to a close on the heartfelt, all encompassing love within Worlds Collide.

The end result is a musical prism, leading the listener through bold, moving and soulful takes on issues such as climate change, George Floyd’s death and legacy, the human toll of the pandemic, and love as the ultimate agent provocateur.

Tribute is also paid to one who changed the art form, Chick Corea, in a tour-de-force medley of two of his best-known compositions.

An array of rhythmic and harmonic textures is reflected and refracted as Love and the Catalyst invites the listener to chance, be changed, and make change.

Official Website

Aimée Allen @ Facebook

Aimée Allen @ Bandcamp