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With her jazzer's chops and satisfyingly eclectic songlist, soulful expressiveness and spirited sense of adventure, Andrea Wolper has been winning national and international audiences. Blending great standard repertoire, original songs and music from unexpected sources with influences from the blues to middle eastern harmonies, pop to poetry, she and her group invite listeners along for a ride through intimate musical journeys and surprising, often humorous, adventures.

Andrea appears in clubs, festivals and concert halls in the U.S. and internationally. New York performance credits include Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola (Jazz at Lincoln Center), Iridium, Sweet Rhythm, 55 Bar, Cornelia Street Café, Makor, JVC New York Jazz Festival, and more. Additional appearances include Jazz at the Cape (South Africa), Donne in Musica Festival (Italy), Hot Clube (Portugal), Club Reduta (Czech Rep.), Oxident Club (Berlin), Greater Hartford Festival of Jazz, Fairfax (CA) Jazz Festival, Jazz on the Plazz (CA), First Night New York, Many Colors of a Woman Jazz Concerts, and performances on numerous other concert and festival stages. She appeared by special invitation in "A Singers Celebration" at the Blue Note in New York, joining an impressive roster of jazz vocalists.

Andrea plays with some of the most exciting and respected instrumentalists in New York and beyond. She leads a trio with Ron Affif (guitar) and Ken Filiano (bass), and a quintet with Michael Howell (guitar), Filiano, Michael T.A. Thompson (soundrhythium), and Patience Higgins (saxes). She is also a member of TranceFormation, an improvising trio with Filiano and the renowned pianist Connie Crothers.

Andrea's most recent recording, "The Small Hours" (VarisOne.Jazz), is built around the trio with Affif, and Filiano. Produced by Todd Barkan, the CD also features drummers Victor Lewis and Jamey Haddad, and guest artists Lou Marini (flute) and Frank London (trumpet and flugelhorn). The CD, with Andrea's arrangements of standard and non-standard music, as well as her own compositions, continues to receive high critical praise and to be heard on radio since its release in late 2005. Andrea's 1998 self-titled debut CD was also praised in music industry journals and has been the subject of radio feature presentations.

Although Andrea appears most often as the leader of her own group, she is also a member of Art Lillard's Heavenly Big Band and of the Over 18 Improvising Big Band, and has appeared as a guest artist with other large and small jazz ensembles, including Voices Together, as well as on recordings combining poetry and improvised music. In 2006, she, along with Crothers, and Filiano, was selected to perform in concert at the International Society of Improvised Music inaugural conference. In 2003, she organized and performed in a 13-member ensemble of women musicians for the JVC NY Jazz Festival; she was part of a smaller group from that ensemble that then was invited to perform the closing concert in the Donne in Musica Festival in Frascati, Italy.

In addition to singing, Andrea is a creative songwriter, lyricist, and arranger. Her original compositions and unusual arrangements of standard material, as well as of poetry and music from a variety of genres, reveal a dynamic, singular musical sensibility. She is also an accomplished writer whose journalism and poetry have appeared in numerous publications and whose non-fiction books have received acclaim. For years, Andrea was a writer of feature articles for Back Stage, and wrote for numerous other publications as well. Among her works are two books, "The Actor's City Sourcebook" (Watson-Guptill) and "Women's Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives" (with Julie S. Peters: Routledge); she also contributed an essay to "But is it Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism" (Nina Felshin, Bay Press). As an actor, Andrea performed extensively in her native California and on the Off-Broadway stage; she studied at New York's prestigious Neighborhood Playhouse and Ensemble Studio Theatre.

All these experiences inform Andrea's organic approach to music. Her way with words allows her to create lyrics, for her own and others' compositions, that run the gamut from witty to thought-provoking to deeply moving, and her gift for inhabiting the life and spirit of a character infuses both her approach to song interpretation and her perceptive understanding of the intimate relationship between words and music.

Andrea enjoys teaching private lessons in her home studio, and workshops that focus on releasing music with freedom, spontaneity, and joy. She also teaches vocal technique at Victory Music School in Staten Island, NY. Andrea is a past President of International Women in Jazz, and serves on the Advisory Board of the Jazz Vocal Coalition. Andrea earned a black belt in Shotokan Karate.