New Yorker Fay Victor is a vocalist, composer, lyricist, and educator whose work spans jazz, blues, opera, free improvisation, avant-garde, and modern classical music. Born in 1965 in New York to a Trinidadian mother, Victor spent childhood summers with her grandmother in Trinidad. She grew up with exposure to many kinds of music -- calypso, pop and rock, soul and funk, classical, and finally jazz, the possibilities of which intrigued her. They eventually settled in Long Island, where Victor spent her teenage years. After the sudden death of her mother when she was 19, she found comfort in music and threw herself into it wholeheartedly. Victor began her career as a jazz singer in Japan in 1991, spending three months in Fukui City performing with pianist Bertha Hope. In 1996 she moved to Amsterdam, where she felt more freedom to experiment and expand her musical horizons than she had in New York. There she met bassist Jochem van Dijk, who eventually became her husband. With him, she dug into genres like blues and psychedelia. She also developed a close working relationship with pianist Misha Mengelberg and others in the thriving Dutch improv scene. Inspired by trailblazing artists like Abbey Lincoln, Betty Carter, and Sheila Jordan, she began setting lyrics to the challenging instrumental music of Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, and Herbie Nichols. Together with her creative partners, she developed an improvisatory style she called freesong, with the whole band, including herself, switching back and forth between composed music and free improvisation. Victor returned to New York in 2003 and became an active figure in the city's music scene, performing with the likes of Randy Weston, Roswell Rudd, Anthony Braxton, and Vijay Iyer. Beginning with 1998's In My Own Room, she recorded 14 albums as a solo artist and with her groups the Fay Victor Ensemble and SoundNoiseFunk, including 2001's Darker than Blue, 2009's The Freesong Suite, and 2020's We've Had Enough. Her album Life Is Funny That Way, the first with her ensemble Herbie Nichols SUNG, arrived in April 2024. She was also involved in various educational roles, including as a teacher of vocal performance at the College of Performing Arts of the New School in N.Y.C., and as a private tutor. ~ TiVo Staff, Rovi