Celia Slattery

Folk/Rock…..Jazz….Theatre. Celia Slattery has taken these disparate influences and turned them into a unique performance style and career.

Celia has performed at clubs, festivals, and performing arts centers throughout the United States and abroad, including Ryles and Scullers jazz clubs in Boston, Bridges Bar at the New York Hilton, SoHO in Santa Barbara, California, the Montreal Fringe Festival, and the Bamboo Bar at the Oriental Hotel, Bangkok.

Celia’s back-up ranges from a duo with piano accompaniment to a full band with piano, bass, drums, and guitar. She performs for special events, in intimate clubs and dinner theaters, performing arts centers and outdoor festivals.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND

Celia’s performance style melds her background in folk, jazz and theatre. As a child growing up in Santa Barbara, California, Celia studied piano and performed in musical theatre.

When her family moved to Washington DC, she was introduced to the topical singer-songwriters of the 60's and 70's - as well as to progressive politics.

A single mother at age 19, Celia managed to put herself through school, earning a degree in theatre and piecing together a career in performing arts..

While living in New Hampshire, Celia debuted as a solo acoustic act at the legendary Folkway in Peterborough, NH. Throughout the 80’s she toured the New England folk circuit, singing original songs at coffeehouses and clubs such as Club Passim in Cambridge, Mass and the Iron Horse in Northampton, while perfecting her covers singing over crowds in noisy bars.

After returning to Boston, Celia expanded her musical horizons with studies in Jazz at New England Conservatory, and she began playing with some of the best musicians in town. The bars got a little better, including a seven-month stint in 1991 singing at the Bamboo Bar in the legendary Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. The Oriental, the oldest hotel in Bangkok, was the one-time residence of authors like Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham, and is often cited as the world’s #1 hotel. (The experience is immortalized in the song, “Bamboo Bar” on her Cast of Characters album.)

With help from well-known director Bill Castellino, Celia created a one-woman musical show, Moving Target, a classic tale about growing up amidst the turbulent political and social changes of the 60’s and 70’s. Moving Target toured from 1997 – 2004 at venues such as the Montreal Fringe Festival, the New England Theater Conference, and Jimmy Tingle’s Off-Broadway Theatre.

Currently, Celia performs in clubs and arts centers, featuring her original music as well as fresh interpretations of standards.

She is also touring a show called "First Ladies of Jazz and Pop" which features music of trail-blazing American women, from early blues singers like Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, to sixties songwriters and early rockers, all the way to the present. The music is woven together with a compelling narrative, exploring how these figures were affected by their times, and how they in turn brought about change through their enduring music..