A lawyer by day, Jordana Talsky moonlights as a jazz singer in Toronto clubs and at music festivals throughout Ontario. She’s a budding songwriter who was a finalist in the 2014 John Lennon Songwriting Competition and she’s a trained classical singer. 

Her repertoire includes pop music as well as jazz standards, and she describes her style as a jazzy take on pop songs and a “poppier” take on jazz songs. She adds elements of funk, R&B and vocal percussion to her interpretations. 

“I call it ‘pop jazz,’” she said. As a jazz vocalist, Talsky has been working hard to develop her own style, which she says is evolving. “The thing about being an artist is developing your own sound, not just singing songs,” she said.   

Talsky’s voice, now rich and strong, was discovered by her Grade 1 teacher at Associated Hebrew Schools of Toronto, at a Shacharit service where Talsky sang a solo. After that, she was enrolled in piano lessons, Talsky said. “Not to get voice training, just to learn how to read music and to start off my music education.” 

When Talsky’s mother, Helene, took her for singing lessons, the teacher recommended that Talsky join a choir instead. “She said that kids don’t need singing lessons. What they need to learn, they can learn in choir,” Talsky said.  

She joined the Canadian Children’s Opera Chorus and sang in Canadian Opera Company productions with the chorus for seven years. Talsky got her introduction to jazz as a member of a vocal jazz ensemble  at Toronto’s Earl Haig Secondary School, where she was enrolled in the Claude Watson Arts Program.  

At Montreal’s McGill University, majoring in English for her BA, Talsky’s extracurricular activities included training with opera instructors and singing with a jazz-funk group, an a cappella group and a Gilbert and Sullivan theatre company.  

While she attended law school at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont. – Talsky is now a will and estate lawyer – she performed regularly at Maggie’s Supper and Jazz Club there. 

“I really wanted to be doing something beside law school courses,” she said.  

Intrigued by the complexity of jazz, she started to get serious about the music at that point. “Jazz is a natural progression of classical,” she said. “It moves me as music in ways that others don’t.” 

Her critically acclaimed release Standard Deviation includes jazz standards and pop tunes, plus two original songs. One of them is Pantas Niwas, for which she was named a finalist in the John Lennon Songwriting Competition. Talsky wrote Pantas Niwas while she was in Nepal in 2006, after she finished her BA. The lyrics reflect her year there, volunteering and staying with the Pantas family, and the title means “Memories of the Pantas Family.”  Also included on the CD is the jazz standard Devil May Care, in which Talsky demonstrates her vocal percussion skills. 

“The material is there and you try to make it your own,” she said. One of the pop songs on Standard Deviation, Love Me (Lovefool), a hit in the 1990s for the Swedish band, the Cardigans, shows how Talsky can take a pop song and turn it into jazz. She’s working on a followup to Standard Deviation, which will include more original material. 

Talsky will be performing a mix of jazz standards and tunes by Stephen Sondheim and Burt Bacharach on June 21 at 9 p.m. with pianist Adrian Farrugia and drummer Pat Collins at Mezzetta Restaurant and Tapas Bar as part of the TD Toronto Jazz Festival. Also part of the jazz festival is Talsky’s gig  on June 22 at 8 p.m. at May Café, where she and guitarist Eric St-Laurent will focus on funky material and pop music. 

For more information visit torontojazz.com and jordanatalsky.com.