Rochelle House

Rochelle House was born in San Jose, California. Her father was a basketball coach; her mother was a philosopher. She says, “Both of my parents sang to me. My father sang country songs from his youth and my mother sang beautiful folk songs to us at bedtime. She always had the record player on with a mix of Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, and Barbra Streisand.”

Rochelle studied jazz, commercial music, and studio singing in Southern California. While learning how to work in a recording studio in her late teens, Rochelle discovered a passion for studio time that remains to this day. In her twenties, she changed her artistic focus from music to child development, raising “four very beautiful human beings.” During this period she wrote “a bunch of folk songs” during nap time.

In her forties, Rochelle returned to music: going to jam sessions, studying with the free jazz vocalist Jay Clayton, and attending the Centrum jazz workshops. She took courses at the University of Washington and mixed them up with classes at Antioch University to get her BA. Having just earned a master’s degree in Whole Systems Design at the Center for Creative Change at Antioch University–Seattle, Rochelle admits she went back to school to educate herself in order to write more powerful lyrics.

With all of the time spent in the recording studio as a youth, Rochelle came to think of the recording process as an art form. Her first recording “Dreams of love” was well received by the community. It earned her a nomination for Vocalist of the Year by Seattle’s Earshot Jazz organization.

These days
Rochelle is promoting her sophomore cd “Water.” An interesting mix of her own compositions and unusual pieces played by a world-class group of Seattle-based jazz musicians, including pianist Marc Seales, trumpeter Cuong Vu, cellist Paul Rucker, bassist Evan Flory-Barnes, and drummer D’Vonne Lewis. She classifies this music as “Cold Jazz.” Using “Water” as a title and including the organization Water1st on the cd cover is an attempt to encourage people to become familiar with the decisions that are being made about water ownership and the availability of clean water, with the hope that people will be inspired to help to make our world as good as it can be, for everybody.