Senior Danielle Harris was hard to track down last year because she spent most of it working to pay off voice lessons in New York with celebrity-acclaimed vocal coach Don Lawrence, who has experience with the likes of Bon Jovi and Whitney Houston. This year, to get back into the Penn music scene, Danielle successfully applied to Penn’s Music 10 program. The program, open to music majors and minors, grants Danielle twenty vocal lessons for the school year. She will be working with Philly jazz vocalist Joanna Pascale, who performs at the Loews Hotel three nights a week. Danielle has looked up to her since her freshman year and says, “[Joanna] has this rare capacity as a jazz singer to really command her band. As a vocalist, she asserts her role as a musician through a profound ability to understand and work with other musicians.”
Danielle has some of her own experience with bands, though. Not only is she a classically trained vocalist with experience that ranges from opera to Motown, but she headed up a rock band called The Plaine Truth while touring the Tri-State area for nearly two years. Remembering her first show, she laughs, “the shit I wore at our first gig – I almost got arrested.”
Her one true love, though, is the blues. “The blues is so transitional – in one song, it sounds like jazz – and in another – it sounds like rock” Danielle says. Her inspiration draws from across the board, from Janis Joplin to Betty Carter to Billy Strayhorn. As a jazz music minor, Danielle laughs, “It’s so funny…learning on paper what Jazz is ten years after growing up on Led Zeppelin... a lot of the blues that underline so much of jazz is straight up what Led Zeppelin does.”
Danielle feels lucky to have parents that are so supportive of her ambitions; she smirks and says, "they have agreed to put up with me for a few years, so long as I graduate on time." After her planned graduation as an art history major in May, Danielle plans to undertake a part-time job while pursuing her music career. Watching her peers go through OCR, Danielle says, “it’s hard knowing there are more stable ways to live my life.” Nonetheless, she claims, “Just because I love many things and can see myself going back into the art world, or even to law school, I know I have to give myself, my music, a fair shot. If I don't, I know I'll never live that down.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JZrYSnBx2bw
