Alexis - "Rebecca started meeting with me to fine tune tracks for her upcoming release, and has been a member since May 27, 2020, one of the very first members of our budding community! And she's one of our first Annual Performer Members, with access to the entire archive of classes! In addition to being an awesome singer, her day job career is pretty killing as well - she coaches actors in dialects, articulation and Freeing the Natural Voice, as well as music direction and vocal coaching for productions. She's currently musical directing Seussical at a middle school and coaching dialects for The Old Man and the Old Moon at a high school. I also love that she performs and records primarily with her Dad!"
Rebecca DuMaine is a Designated Linklater Voice Teacher and Speech Specialist. She holds a BA in Drama from Duke University and an MFA in Acting from Rutgers, Mason Gross School of the Arts. Ms. DuMaine spent many years acting in New York City and regionally, on stage and on the small screen. She has taught voice and speech at NYU, Rutgers, SUNY Purchase, Pace University, The Maggie Flanigan and Bill Esper Studios and in the graduate acting programs at Columbia and The Actors Studio, where she designed the speech curriculum. She currently teaches voice, speech, audition and dialects in the BFA and MFA Programs at the Academy of Art University and has a flourishing private practice. She has also vocal and dialect coached for middle school, high school and University theatre productions in NYC and throughout the Bay Area.
And here's her vocalist bio:
A jazz vocalist whose beautiful sound is matched by her exquisite taste, Rebecca DuMaine is an incisive interpreter of classic American standards who’s steeped in the tradition but not bound by it. With her keen ear for drama and supple sense of phrasing she uncovers new emotional terrain whether exploring familiar fair or the American Songbook’s back pages.
Over the past five years she’s released a series of acclaimed albums for Summit Records accompanied by the lithe and indefatigably swinging Dave Miller Trio, starting with 2011’s impressive debut Deed I Do. DuMaine followed up two years later with Better Than Anything, a cohesive collection of songs that “always sparkle and often sizzle,” writes SoundStage. Her 2015 release, The Consequence of You, is swinging and Happy Madness (October 2016) has already spent some time on the Jazzweek top 100 chart.
“I’m always trying to find a song that has a lyric that I can make my own,” says DuMaine. “I really love discovering these unmined gems from the American Songbook, songs that aren’t overplayed. And if a song is well known, I love finding an obscure verse or playing it a different way, interpreting a swing tune as a bossa nova, or swinging a ballad.”
She didn’t start out as a vocalist. After DuMaine earned a drama degree fro Duke University she worked in New York City for years as an actor. At the same time, she started training fellow thespians in a vocal technique developed by Kristen Linklater designed to free an actor’s natural voice.
Her emergence as an enthralling jazz singer isn’t a repudiation of her theatrical background. Rather, it’s a homecoming informed by her background in acting and voice, a marriage of her gift for storytelling with her sensuous musicality.
Considering the transformative power of her passion for jazz, it’s not surprising that “all of these paths, voice training and acting, fed into this new thing around the time I was pregnant with my first child, the most visceral, primal experience,” she says. “I believe in my soul that this is what I’ll be doing.” Listening to DuMaine, there’s no doubt that she’s found her calling.
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