Terra Hazelton has been singing her whole life, but never imagined herself as a singer. Originally from Calgary, she moved to Toronto to find fame and fortune on the stages there. Someone once gave her a guitar for a variety show and suggested that she write three songs for the sketch. Three chords later, that was the seed that led her on a career path she had never anticipated. Terra moved from performing silly songs in a cabaret setting to forming her own band, leaning towards being a rock chick extraordinaire. She began sitting in with the long-running Melody Ranch afternoon matinée at the Brunswick House in Toronto, where famed singer/guitarist Jeff Healey happened to hear her sing one Saturday. Healey was himself moving into new musical territory after opening a night club and following his love of traditional jazz with his own Saturday matinée band, the Jazz Wizards, with whom he played trumpet instead of guitar. When he decided he didn’t want to be the singer for the Jazz Wizards, he remembered the belt and wail of Terra Hazelton from some months prior.
Terra, meanwhile, had been making a go of things in Toronto but missed family and friends back home and decided to pack up and head back to Calgary. En route, she had a terrible car accident that left her hospitalized and recuperating for months. During her healing at home, she received a call out of the blue from Jeff Healey that he wanted her to join his Jazz Wizards. If she hadn’t been recovering from her injuries, she wouldn’t have been able to take him up on his generous offer. Terra feels that fate conspired to put her in the position of being able to sing with the Jazz Wizards.
Terra now plays the weekly Jazz Wizards Saturday matinée show at Jeff Healey’s Road House in Toronto, and has become quite the afficionado of early traditional jazz herself. “I finally found the one way I could use all the things I’ve learned in comedy, theatre, music and singing”, she beams. Releasing a debut solo album, Anybody’s Baby, in 2005 (produced by and featuring Jeff Healey on guitar), Terra began touring with her own band, The Easy Answers. Her debut features swing, traditional jazz, a blues tune and a lot of spunk. With pipes that can rival any diva in the pop world, Terra Hazelton meets each song head-on and makes it her own. The strength of her voice is something most singers aspire to, while she makes it sound effortless. Along the way, she met other musicians with a similar interest in trad jazz, and formed another band called The Hogtown Syncopators, for which Terra sings and plays a snare drum with brushes, demonstrating her versatility. The Hogtown Syncopators released a self-titled album in February 2007 and perform every Friday afternoon at The Rex, a venerable old jazz haunt in downtown Toronto.
Terra has made some wonderful connections in her travels with the Jazz Wizards, The Easy Answers and The Hogtown Syncopators. Along the way, she was scouted to sing on a Pennington’s women’s clothing commercial and impressed the company so much with her charm, her voice and the twinkle in her eye, that she has been modelling for them since 2005. Terra was invited to play the Calgary Jazz Fest as well as the Mountain View Music Festival in Alberta, has performed on the bill at the Oakville Jazz Festival and was hand-picked to represent her home province on the Alberta Scene showcase in Ottawa at the National Arts Centre. She has toured Denmark with a local jazz band there, and sat in with the Joseph Lam Jazz Band in Holland while she was over there. She is a frequent live guest of western Canada’s Polyjesters, and has contributed vocals to many other prestigious artist’s albums, including Alex Pangman’s Christmas Gift holiday CD, the Be-Bop Cowboys’ Canadian Dance Hall CD, and Jeff Healey’s live album It’s Tight Like That with the Jazz Wizards, featuring British trombone legend, Chris Barber. Terra also scored a fantastic gig for the summer of 2007, singing in the cast of the Spiegel Tent and Tavern burlesque/comedy/circus show at Harbourfront in Toronto. And Terra is thrilled to have been chosen for the line-up of CBC Radio’s Vinyl Cafe tour in Ontario for the month of October 2007, alongside Canadian treasure Dan Hill.
With a voice that doesn’t so much shatter glass as it does open doors everywhere, Terra has become a staple in the Canadian music scene.
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