Biography
Award-winning
singer-songwriter LAURA WETZLER tours in over 150 concerts
and lectures each year, singing critically-acclaimed Contemporary
Folk/Americana originals, World Jewish Roots Music in Hebrew,
Yiddish and Ladino(Judeo-Spanish) and the great classics
of American songwriting. Her debut CD of original songs,
Songwriter's Notebook receives airplay on over 300 radio
stations around the world and has garnered great reviews
for both her "impressive poetic gifts"-Bob Sherman,
NY Times and her voice, "which grabs a listener and
won't let go"-Seth Rogovoy, WAMC/Public Radio. In addition
to her extensive Songwriter's Notebook concert tour, she
created and performs in more than 20 different theme or
tribute concerts/ lectures, among them a unique duo show
with gospel singer Janiece Thompson called "Jewels
of the Diaspora-A Concert Celebration of African-American
and Jewish Song."
The
restless daughter of a truck driver and a choir director
raised in North Babylon, New York with a voracious musical
curiosity, Laura seemed destined to hit the road singing.
As a kid, she was alternately wailing Beatles and Motown
into a spoon mic, helping to select and time cuts for a
Sunday morning Jewish music folk show her mother hosted
on a local radio station and singing in her mom's choir.
Teaching herself to play her $14 guitar by singing her way
through Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins songbooks, she also
counts Billie Holiday, the Child Ballads, Bessie Smith,
sacred chant, Odetta, Bernstein, Sondheim, Carole King,
Seeger and Shawn Colvin among her diverse musical influences.
Laura began singing professionally at age 15, singing and
teaching the traditional songs in Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish
and Yiddish from the Mid-east, Europe, Africa, and the Americas
heard in her childhood. She began writing and singing her
own songs, studied music, graduating from Hofstra University
on a full, 4 year vocal scholarship as the Dorothea B. Hoag
Scholar in Music.
All
the while, Laura was working in synagogues and singing folk-rock
and blues covers in L.I. and NYC clubs at night. Along the
way, she also studied at the HB Studio in NYC. Combining
these many musical interests, she learned her craft at a
hundred NYC café's, colleges, community centers,
concert halls and street festivals, sometimes sharing her
music for civil rights and anticensorship causes. Although
her career has been focused on live shows, Laura's indie
single, Jesse Helms Has Made A Radical Out of Me, received
nationwide airplay, becoming sound track for the film, State
of the Art: Art of the State, an anticensorship documentary
screened on PBS and at the Whitney Museum. Today, Singout
Magazine's Vic Heyman calls Laura "a road warrior…who
can belt out a song with the best singers on the circuit",
playing concert halls, arts festivals, clubs, colleges,
museums, and on national TV and radio, having appeared with
such artists as Richie Havens, The Klezmatics, Odetta, Disappear
Fear, David Amram, Vance Gilbert, Laurie Anderson and many
others. She is featured on The Best of American Independent
Music compilation CD from Songs.com, and the legendary Pete
Seeger has presented her song B'makom-In A Place, in concert.
When not on tour, Laura divides her time between NYC and
Cummington, MA.
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