Grace Kelly

Grace Kelly (born Grace Chung; May 15, 1992) is an American jazz musician, composer, and arranger. Kelly has produced and released recordings of her own, scored soundtracks, and tours with her band. She was named one of Glamour magazine's Top 10 College Women in 2011; and she has been featured on CNN.com and on the NPR radio shows Piano Jazz with both Marian McPartland and Jon Weber, as well as on WBGO's JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater. Working professionally since she was a preteen, Kelly was dubbed a prodigy in the jazz world. In 2014, Kelly worked with the producer Stewart Levine on her EP, Working for the Dreamers, which was released in September of that year. She was featured in the December 2015 issue of Vanity Fair as a significant millennial in the jazz world. Kelly was named "Rising Star – Alto Saxophone" in DownBeats 2016 Critics Poll. Her Trying to Figure It Out (2016 PAZZ) release was voted the number-two Jazz Album of the Year in the 2016 DownBeat readers' poll. Early life and education Born Grace Chung in Wellesley, Massachusetts, to Korean parents, she moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, when she was 2 years old. She briefly played clarinet and classical piano before finding her voice on the saxophone. Kelly stated, "Saxophone reminds me of the human voice. And I always felt this very compelling, this feeling, that someone was singing to me. The Girl from Ipanema was on repeat in my household when I was a little girl and thought: ‘I wanna learn this one day.’ It’s one of the instruments that’s closest to expressing the human voice.”