Club Des Belugas feat. Anna Luca & Brenda Boykin [Live] (2010)

Club des Belugas is one of the leading lounge & nujazz projects in Germany, perhaps in Europe. They combine Contemporary European Lounge & Nujazz Styles with Brazilian Beats and American Black Soul of the fifties, sixties and seventies, using their unique creativity and intensity.

Main members are Maxim Illion & Kitty the Bill, with such exquisite guest vocalists as the Californian Jazz Lady Brenda Boykin, Swedish singer Anna Luca, London based Jazz singer Iain Mackenzie, Anne Schnell from Jojo Effect, Ferank Manseed from Newcastle/UK, Dean Bowman from New York, trumpeter Reiner Winterschladen (Nighthawks) and trumpet player Thomas Siffling.

Anna Luca is on her way to becoming one of the great new discoveries on the international jazz scene. This Swedish-German singer has already toured extensively with the successful NuJazz project CLUB DES BELUGAS, playing at such renowned festivals as The Hague Jazz Festival, and scoring great success with songs like “The Road is Lonesome” or “It’s a Beautiful Day”.

Her music, however, has already achieved this and found its own style – somewhere between jazz and pop, between Tom Waits, J.J. Cale and Billie Holiday, who have always been her great sources of inspiration. No matter whether her music is unplugged or electric, gentle or headstrong, wild or melancholy, you can feel the honesty in every syllable she sings.

Brenda Boykin has performed at many of the famous jazz festivals like the Monterey Jazz Festivals, San Francisco Blues Festivals, DuMaurier Jazz Festivals in Vancouver, Umbria Jazz Festivals and the Montreux Jazz Festival (which she was awarded best vocalist in 2005), she also has performed in Mexico, France, New Zealand, Japan and of course thousands of times in the USA and Germany.

1997 she received a BAMMY nomination for "Best vocalist of the Year".
Since 2005 she's working with the German Nu-Jazz Project "Club des Belugas"
Brenda Boykin's solo album "chocolate and chilli", which has been released in October 2008, has been chosen by BBC among the best albums of the year 2008.