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Nicole Stromsoe-Wine Festival Saturday

Bring a chair, bring your friends and enjoy the free live music! Food available for purchase.

Raised in the coastal vil­lage of Cam­bria, Cal­i­for­nia, and on the road trav­el­ing to var­i­ous US art fes­ti­vals, Nicole Stromsoe’s life has been immersed in cre­ative awareness.

Daugh­ter of renowned sil­ver­smith, Randy Strom­soe, Nicole grew up with the sound of ham­mers accom­pa­ny­ing an ever-play­ing stereo. Music was high­ly revered in her house­hold and she was intro­duced to a wide spec­trum of genre and musi­cal expression.

It was in her ear­ly devel­op­ment that she iden­ti­fied as ​“design­er”, just like her par­ents; now, how­ev­er, she prac­tices most­ly in the aur­al arts. Design­ing shapes and sounds both intan­gi­ble and imper­ma­nent, she crafts not only the song itself, but its inter­pre­ta­tion, breath, phras­ing, space, and the place­ment of how it will land ​‘out there’.

“I have a par­tic­u­lar affin­i­ty for how music influ­ences and defines envi­ron­ment; the envi­ron­ment with­in as well as the space sur­round­ing our­selves. It has the pow­er to dic­tate both a very spe­cif­ic, and an over­all expe­ri­ence, much like light­ing. I strive to cre­ate an atmos­phere of warmth with a sense of sus­pen­sion; a push/​pull of weight­ed and lift­ed space. The inten­tion is not only that the lis­ten­er will be aware of this sen­sa­tion with­in them­selves, but the whole room will be alive with it, too.”

Nicole’s ear­li­est mem­o­ries include imi­tat­ing every Ella Fitzger­ald nuance on a Gersh­win album as ear­ly as 5 years old, and con­tin­u­ous­ly replay­ing a col­lec­tion of Atlantic Soul Clas­sic hits from which she first fell for voic­es such as Bar­bara Lewis.

Singing in choirs from 8 years old, she took charge in putting togeth­er a vocal jazz quar­tet while in high school. Want­i­ng to make music more of a focus in her life, she trans­ferred to the Idyll­wild Arts Acad­e­my and start­ed seri­ous­ly study­ing clas­si­cal vocal tech­nique, aria, and art song.

She con­tin­ued to explore the clas­si­cal tra­di­tion for a short peri­od in Siena, Italy. There, she heard a jazz quar­tet per­form­ing in a neigh­bor­hood alcove and it rang true for her to fur­ther her stud­ies in jazz.

Return­ing to California’s Cen­tral Coast, Nicole con­tin­ued music stud­ies at Cues­ta Col­lege while start­ing to per­form out as a jazz vocal­ist. She was trav­el­ing back and forth to Los Ange­les and San Fran­cis­co for var­i­ous work­shops and vocal edu­ca­tion cours­es when she decid­ed to study at the Berklee Col­lege of Music, Boston.

She grad­u­at­ed Magna Cum Laude, and there, sur­pris­ing­ly, was re-intro­duced to a famil­iar love of folk/​Americana/​roots music. Mem­o­ries of the tones pound­ing met­al cre­at­ed over this music, played in the sil­ver­smith work­shop grow­ing up, were brought back loud­er than ever.

She start­ed to incor­po­rate this influ­ence into her set; cre­at­ing an eclec­tic array of jazz, blues, old r&b, folk, and roots music. Of course, with the influ­ence of her edu­ca­tion, trav­els, and life expe­ri­ences, this ​“root­ed” Amer­i­can music is cre­at­ed from a unique con­tem­po­rary space that is Nicole Stromsoe.