Wesla Whitfield, Phenomenal Singer

 Wesla Whitfield is a remarkable singer, with a deep love for that rich storehouse of musical treasures often identified as The Great American Popular Songbook. Wesla has been developing her skills and learning her demanding craft for a number of years - by her own estimate, it’s been ever since she “knew at age two-and-a-half that I would grow up to be a singer.”

Her sound and approach would seem to place her somewhere in the intriguing area that borders on both jazz and that aspect of pop music which draws its material largely from the great standards and neglected gems of such as Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hart.

 Wesla, with her husband/pianist/arranger, Mike Greensill performs annually at the Hollywood/Roosevelt Cinegrill, The Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room in New York, at Blues Alley in Washington DC, Jazz Alley in Seattle, at the world renowned Pizza on the Park in London and for two months each winter in San Francisco at the York Hotel Plush Room as well as numerous concert venues throughout the States and Europe. She has opened at Michigan’s Meadowbrook, New Jersey’s Garden State Art Center and Flint Center in Cupertino for such notables as George Burns, Michael Feinstein and Frankie Laine.Solo symphonic appearances include two concerts with the San Francisco Symphony as well as San Jose, Sacramento, Omaha, Stockton, Napa, Auburn, Concord Pavilion, Santa Rosa and California Symphonies.

Wesla has appeared twice on Garrison Keillor’s national show, “Prairie Home Companion”, singing with the legendary trumpeter, Joe Wilder, on ‘Weekend Edition’ with Susan Stamberg, ‘On Fresh Air’ with Terry Gross, and on All Things Considered’ with Robert Siegel. In TV venues, the pair have been featured five times on the Charles Grodin show, performed on the Regis and Kathie Lee show, and were the subject of a feature story on America’s favorite TV show, ‘CBS Sunday Morning’ with Charles Osgood.

In summer of ‘95 Wesla and Michael appeared as part of the JVC Jazz Festival at Avery Fisher Hall in New York and also made their Carnegie Hall debut that same summer, participating the Tribute to Frank Sinatra. Since then they have appeared in the  ‘96 Ella Fitzgerald, the‘97 Nat Cole and the ‘98 Judy Garland tributes, also held at Carnegie Hall. In June of ‘96 they were invited by Hillary Clinton to perform at the White House.

In October ‘98, Wesla debuted her one-woman, autobiographical show at the Kaufman Theater on 42nd street in New York to massive, critical acclaim. Their sixteenth and highly acclaimed recording "In My Life" is soon to be joined by their seventeenth, featuring the Klinglehorn French Horn Quartet and Gary Foster on the HighNote record label.

As invited members of the repertory company and the ongoing salute to American Popular Song at Lincoln Center, Whitfield and Greensill perform often in New York as well as prominent Boston, Philadelphia and St. Louis venues. Most recently Wesla was seen as "Bloody Mary" in the St. Louis MUNY’s production of ‘South Pacific’. In San Francisco, their ongoing vocal workshop series provides vocalists from all over the country with invaluable instruction in the interpretive skills so necessary and integral a part of the Great American Popular songbook.-