Born in Iowa on March 11, 1940, singer Patty Waters has taken vocal jazz to its freest improvisations. She began performing while still at school, then in a hotel orchestra, when her family moved to Denver, Colorado. Fascinated by Billie Holiday's interpretations, Patty Waters left to try her luck in New York, where she was noticed by saxophonist Albert Ayler, who introduced her to Bernard Stollman, founder and owner of the ESP-Disk label, for whom she recorded her first album, Sings (1965). Composed mainly of her own compositions, Sings demonstrates the great agility of its performer, whose vocals oscillate from murmuring to the unbridled lyricism of the traditional "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair", reinvented for the occasion over thirteen minutes. After a tour summarized in the album College Tour (1966), which saw her experiment even more, Patty Waters appeared on the Marzette Watts Ensemble album in 1968, then moved to Europe for a while, before stepping away from the stage to devote herself to her family life in California. Thirty years after her last appearance, the singer returned to music with the album Love Songs (1996), followed by concerts with pianist Burton Greene. In 2004, the archival compilation You Thrill Me: A Musical Odyssey brought together recordings dating from 1962 to 1979, while the reissue of her first two albums on The Complete ESP-Disk Recordings in 2006 rehabilitated the experimental artist for a wider audience. Returning with the live albums Live (2019) and An Evening in Houston (2020), Patty Waters shows that the stage remains her preferred domain. In 2020, the unreleased 1970 album Plays was also released on her own label. On June 29, 2024, Patty Waters died in Santa Cruz (California), aged 78.
