Muriel Zoe - Red and Blue (2003)

Muriel Zoe’s debut album on ACT Red and Blue (ACT 9416-2) caused quite a sensation throughout Germany when it was released one and a half years ago. “A debut that reverberates throughout the land” wrote the Hamburger Morgenpost accurately summarising the reaction of press and public. Another of Germany’s major daily newspapers, the WAZ, called the album “one of the most significant recent releases”.
Muriel Zoe was born in 1969 in the German city of Ludwigshafen and spent a part of her education at an English boarding school in South India. Back in Germany, she began to play guitar at the age of 12 and wrote, when 15, her first original songs. Before she turned to music and formed her first band in 1992, she studied painting and graphic art, and makes her living today in Hamburg with two fully-fledged careers - as a freelance musician and as an artist.
Red and Blue focused primarily on jazz standards, which these days can mean a certain risk for a young singer. But the confidence of her expressive and highly-personal interpretations of the classics of the jazz catalogue beguiled. Effortlessly she was “able to take songs interpreted a thousand times before and make them into individual, transparently-acoustic musical pearls.”(Jazzthing)