Join me for After Hours Alaska at 9 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 26, on KRBD public radio in Ketchikan, Alaska, as I’m joined in conversation with jazz vocalist and former Alaskan Halie Loren.

Halie is an international, award-winning jazz singer/songwriter. This Oregon-based artist brings a fresh and original perspective to time-honored musical paths, channeling her innate understanding of connectedness across musical boundaries to forge bonds with diverse audiences in North America, Asia, and Europe.

Nature, and the natural world, has always featured significantly in Loren’s songwriting. As a child growing up in Alaska, and then as an adult in the Pacific Northwest, her wonder and gratitude for the gifts of the great outdoors have inspired a reverence and communion she brings forth in song.

Halie’s began her career as something of a prodigy at age 13, when she won a songwriting contest, gaining national attention. Before she was 19, she did a stint in Nashville, soaking up that city’s ancestry of great American songwriting. She recorded her first album at 20, and from there she was off and running, recording successive albums that garnered awards, Billboard recognition and an international following that has sent her touring around the globe, including stops in Korea, Africa, Japan, Canada and the Caribbean, to name a few locations. Her records regularly make “best of” lists, and her sublime talents as a vocalist are attested to by several albums hitting the No. 1 slot on Canadian and Japanese jazz charts.

Considering such success, it would have been understandable for Loren to toe the line and stick to the known path with her new album, From the Wild Sky. Instead she chose to take a leap of faith, forging ahead with a vision that encompassed the full complement of her compositional talents. Funding her latest efforts through fan pledges to a Kickstarter campaign, she teamed up with producer Troy Miller (Gregory Porter, Laura Mvula, Jamie Cullum) and a handful of all-star musicians, including Femi Temowo, Ben Williams, Michael Olatuja, Nathan Schram, Andrew Yee, and Becca Stevens (featured on the track “Wild Birds”).

Click this link to go to Halie’s personal website.