Jazz concert canceled by Frankfort flood is on: Jane Monheit coming to the Grand

A few minutes before our scheduled interview time, Jane Monheit texts an apology. The double-Grammy nominated jazz vocalist is in the middle of her very visible side hustle as a voice teacher. At the moment she is attempting to comfort a student who is “distressed.”

The delay is brief and soon a voice as animated in conversation as it is in performance explains the duties of her offstage life.

“Voice teachers are often therapists of a kind,” she said. “I had this young girl who was very upset, so I was trying to talk her off a ledge. Poor baby, she’s fine now. Nothing big was wrong. Just lost voice, big show coming up. Everything will be fine.”

The takeaway from this? If Jane Monheit tells you everything in regard to the state and stature of your singing will be fine, everything will be. 

For the past 25 years, her recordings have allowed a voice of bold, articulate and very assured expression to wrap around the compositions of Antonio Carlos Jobim, Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Lerner & Lowe, George Gershwin and many other torchbearers representing the golden ages of jazz, show tunes and the Great American Songbook. The love of performance that coincided with such a repertoire has made her a vocal artist who commands an international following along with a working stateside regimen so expansive that she works with different backing bands on the East and West Coasts.

It’s of no surprise, then, that before Monheit lands in Central Kentucky for a July 30 concert at the Grand Theatre in Frankfort, she will play week-long engagements at two prestigious clubs – Smoke Jazz Club in New York and Blues Alley in Washington, D.C.

“Almost all the venues I play feel like home now because I’ve played them all so often,” Monheit said. “When you’re a jazz musician, you sort of have this circuit of wonderful venues around our country that you play every year or every couple of years. All of the clubs really feel like home. The theatres are always a special treat, because you don’t come to them quite as often and because they’re bigger.”

Which brings us – or, rather, Monheit – to the Grand Theatre. It doesn’t exactly have the marquee notoriety as Smoke or Blues Alley, nor does Frankfort maintain the kind of fervent jazz and cabaret audience base as New York or Washington. For Monheit, that’s the whole point of coming to Kentucky. Performing in major metropolitan markets means a welcoming familiarity, but visiting cities where such music is perhaps less available offers the opportunity of expansion – for her regional popularity, as well as for the repertoire she champions.

“Oftentimes, when you play in front of an audience that gets tons and tons and tons of this music, they maybe become a little jaded or a little bored and maybe the level of appreciation is a little different. But when you come to a community where it is a special thing and you find people who are really excited to have you there, it’s a beautiful thing.”

At first, it looked like Monheit and Kentucky weren’t going to connect at all. Her Grand Theatre concert was originally scheduled for April 6. Massive storms, a rapidly rising Kentucky River and city-wide flooding with subsequent evacuations cancelled the date. 

“We got stormed out, unfortunately. I’m glad we were able to get the show back on the books so quickly.”

Moneheit’s Frankfort show comes on the heels of her 13th and newest album, a self-titled work that continues to mine inspirations from two of her most prominent inspirations – globally accented jazz and Broadway.

From the former comes a pair of tunes by Brazilian composer/performer Ivan Kins highlighted by a light, elegant reading of “My Brazil.” Representing the latter are two more compositions from pioneering musical theatre composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim that include a similarly summery version of the “Sweeney Todd” character study “Green Finch and Linnet Bird.” 

“Most of the composers whose work I deal with on a daily basis have passed on – long ago,” Monheit said. “So, it’s interesting to record the music of Ivan who is a friend and who I know will hear it and have opinions because he’s the person who wrote the songs. I get nervous, but I’m also deeply, deeply proud to record Ivan’s music. I hero-worship the guy and have since I was 17 years old. It means a lot to me to record his music because I know he’s going to hear it. That changes everything.”

Monheit found Sondheim’s “Green Finch and Linnet Bird,” which dates to the 1970s, to be an especially appropriate tune for more recent times.

“Out here on the West Coast (a Long Island native, the singer currently resides in Los Angeles) my pianist is Max Haymer, who will be with me in Kentucky. He is a great theatre lover. During the pandemic, he came to me with this arrangement of ‘Green Finch and Linnet Bird.’ It was like, ‘I think this would be great for you.’ And I was like, ‘This is brilliant. This exactly describes how we feel. We’re trapped as artists like birds in a cage. We can’t go make music for people.’ We talk about it as our pandemic theme song and we’ve played it ever since.”

Though Monheit released her debut album when she was 22, fascination with singing and a desire to make it the focus of her working life, began much earlier.

“There was never really a time where I wasn’t determined to pursue this. I was, like, two years old and thought, ‘I’m going to grow up and be a singer.’ Whether I was singing standards or belting along to the ‘Annie’ cast recording at that age, I knew I was going to do this. My whole family supported me. They all had discerning enough ears to be able to say, ‘We support our kid because we think she can actually do this for a living on some level.’ So, they supported me as did all of the teachers I ever had.

“Well, I remember one teacher being a naysayer. It was my science teacher in 7th grade. I was like, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Go back to geology.’ I remember thinking he was a weenie at the time. And he was. But I grew up in this incredibly supportive school environment where I had people educating me all the time, down to my junior high school principal making me mix tapes of Anita O’Day because he thought I should be checking her out alongside Ella (Fitzgerald) and Sarah (Vaughan) and all the other singers I was listening to. Or my band teacher getting us all started on jazz in 3rd grade and teaching us to solo over the blues by the time we were nine. I was a very, very lucky kid. That was Long Island in the ’80s and ’90s.

“I honestly enjoy performing now more than I ever have. I appreciate it more as I get older, for sure, but it’s really about the people. It’s the connection we make with the listeners. I’ve made some of my closest friends because they were originally people who listened to our music. It’s the interactions with the audience that make my career what it is.”

Jane Monheit

When: July 30 at 7:30 p.m.

Where: Grand Theatre, 308 St. Clair St. in Frankfort

Tickets: $25-40 through grandtheatre.thundertix.com.

This story was originally published July 28, 2025 at 9:55 AM.