Laura Welland Biography

Not many women are mechanical engineers.
Fewer still hold several patents.
Few women play jazz trumpet; even fewer the double bass. Hardly anybody plays both.
Not many women sell their own company to play jazz full time.
Only one woman in fifty is a redhead.
There’s surely only one red-headed, patent-holding, engineer-pianist-trumpeter-bassist woman in town.
And, she sings.

Her name is Laura Welland, and if you’ve listened to jazz in Seattle in the last decade, you may have heard her playing bass—at Tula's, the Seattle Art Museum, or Benaroya Hall. She's played with Jay Thomas, Hadley Caliman, Julian Priester, Dawn Clement and other Seattle jazz greats; she's studied under Chuck Deardorf, John Clayton and the late Ray Brown; on the side, received her music degree from Cornish College of the Arts. Her musical pals have praised her swinging time, facile sight-reading, and simpatico stage presence. She's achieved the requisite honors, too, such as runner-up bass at the international "Sisters in Jazz" competition.


But something else needed to be said, or rather, sung. At an instrumental recording session, she sang a tune. Fast forward: Laura's first vocal CD, "Love Is Never Out Of Season" was released in April of 2004, and her second, "Dissertation On The State Of Bliss", will come out in fall of 2005. Both were produced by friend and mentor John Clayton, and include a roster of today's jazz luminaries such as Russell Malone, Kenny Washington, Bill Mays, Joe LaBarbera and Gerald Clayton.
Read part 2