Raya Yarbrough

Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter Raya Yarbrough is not an easy artist to categorize. Yarbrough (who plays acoustic guitar and acoustic piano) is quite capable of performing vocal jazz and has recorded jazz standards such as Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo," Woody Herman's "Early Autumn" and Clifford Brown's "Joy Spring," but her original material is hardly the work of a jazz purist or a bop snob; the Southern Californian has also been greatly affected by soul, folk, blues and rock, making it very difficult to pigeonhole her stylistically. Yarbrough has brought an intriguing v...