Lucy Woodward is a powerhouse singer whose soulful, impeccably controlled vocals will turn on a dime, from a runaway-train full-throttle intensity to a soft, slow burning sultry whisper, only to take you back into an inferno. In 2024, she released Lucy Woodward & The Rocketeers, an album featuring her bespoke 18-person jazz collective - featuring musicians from countries such as The Netherlands, Italy and Ghana - inspired by American composers such as Donny Hathaway and Billy Strayhorn. With dynamic arrangements explicitly written to match Lucy’s passionate vocal manner, color, and timbre; the songs range from high-energy explosions to hauntingly intimate meditations. Read more about Lucy & The Rocketeers.

In 2026, Lucy will release an album of originals that she recorded between Rotterdam, Netherlands and Hamilton, Virginia with her trio The Rocketeers and co-producer Todd Wright who was her guitar player 20+ years ago in her early pop days. She is also currently recording live concerts with the New Rotterdam Jazz Orchestra, an album of originals which fuses soaring vocals, tight grooves, and adventurous orchestration into a fearless, genre-bending, contemporary sound. Both albums will be out on GroundUP Music.

More about Lucy
Born in London, Lucy spent her childhood in New York and The Netherlands. She is the daughter of two classical musicians - her father a conductor and composer, her mother an opera singer, musicologist, teacher and belly-dancer. She learned to play the flute (her first love), took piano lessons after her grandmother every Monday night and studied ballet. When she was 12, she sang in a karaoke booth at the mall and her life was forever changed. She (proudly) went to public high school in The Bronx and was always singing in choirs, girl groups and musicals. “Growing up in NYC you have subway cars to sing in and street corners to sing on so there was always a place to find yourself.”

At age 16, she was accepted into Manhattan School of Music where she studied vocal jazz but she dropped out after a year because she “loved bebop but didn’t sing it”. So she hit the streets and started singing in NYC’s West Village for tips, cover bands, TV commercials and writing songs before signing with Atlantic Records (2003) —a time period that saw her score a Top 40 hit with “Dumb Girls” and another Top 5 hit she wrote for Stacie Orrico called “(There's Gotta Be) More to Life”, earning her 2 BMI Awards. With her debut record in tow, she toured the US, Japan and New Zealand and appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

But Woodward had no desire to be a pop starlet: her follow-up, the jazzier, punchier indie record Lucy Woodward is...Hot and Bothered was released in 2008 which “shed new light” on music-making again. Billboard described how “Lucy's a ball, equally appreciable for fans of melodic sing-along baubles and highbrow aficionados of finely honed musical composition. A sonic turnstile that flips through dreamy pop, jazz and bluesy bebop”.

The release was followed by Hooked!, an album of Brill Building meets Big Band songs, released on Verve (2010) -- which was largely produced by Tony Visconti (David Bowie). The album effortlessly moves across multiple genres, including gypsy-swing and rhythm & blues. Along with her self-penned compositions, the album showcases Lucy’s stunning covers of Peggy Lee’s Cuban-inspired “Sans Souci” and an Ink Spots-inspired a cappella Hoagy Carmichael classic, “Stardust.” Nellie McKay also wrote and sang background vocals for Lucy on “Another Woman” who Lucy was a longtime admirer of.

In 2012, Lucy was asked to tour as a band member filling in for the lead singer of Pink Martini learning songs in Turkish, French, Croatian, Japanese and Spanish with 6 days notice due to the lead singer China Forbes’ emergency vocal surgery. Her short time with the band included dates at Montreal Jazz Fest, Ravinia and working with the San Francisco Symphony for several performances.

Lucy began to work with Snarky Puppy bandleader Michael League, who played bass in her NYC band at the time. She started opening for Snarky Puppy (with them as her backing band) and was featured on Snarky Puppy’s first Grammy award winning Family Dinner, Vol. 1 album singing the bluesy baritone guitar anthem “Too Hot To Last”. League and longtime friend keyboardist/arranger Henry Hey (Forq, David Bowie) co-produced her fourth solo album Til They Bang on The Door which features the Snarky Puppy horns and organist Cory Henry (GroundUP 2016).

In 2018, Lucy teamed up with guitar virtuoso Charlie Hunter and toured extensively in the US & Europe. In 2019, they released their debut collaboration Music!Music!Music! and the follow up album I’m a Stranger Here was released in 2021. All About Jazz said, “Hunter and Woodward had enough chemistry between them to ignite a couple dozen Bunsen Burners”. Lucy and Charlie opened for Snarky Puppy at Royal Albert Hall on their UK tour in 2019. Her conductor father was in the audience who had conducted there several decades earlier many times over when he was a conductor for the BBC singers. More on their project below.

In 2024, Lucy also released Stories From The Dust, written and recorded during the pandemic with GRAMMY-winning producer and co-writer David Garza. Inspired by fiercely independent women from her life and those she observed from afar, the album features Tim Lefebvre, Amy Wood, and co-writer Larry Goldings. Roots-infused and melodic, it continues her decades-long run of craft-driven, critically acclaimed albums.

Lucy has performed her material with jazz orchestras all over Europe. She was a guested with Frankfurt Radio (arranged/conducted by Jim McNeely), WDR (arranged/conducted by Chris Walden), Danish Radio, Odense Jazz Orchestra, Orchestra Jazz Siciliana, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and Croatian Radio & TV Jazz Orchestra. In addition to her solo career, Woodward has sung legends such as Rod Stewart, Celine Dion, Barbra Streisand, Chaka Khan, Carole King and Joe Cocker. She has been featured on movie soundtracks such as What a Girl Wants, The Blind Side, Music and Lyrics, Last Vegas and Ice Princess, with her rendition of the Bjork/Betty Hutton Big Band classic "It's Oh So Quiet”. “Quiet” was also in the trailer of blockbuster movie Birds of Prey and has been featured in numerous commercials and TV shows.

A little bit about Charlie Hunter & Lucy Woodward project

The musical partnership of guitarist Charlie Hunter and vocalist Lucy Woodward was forged under inauspicious, curveball-icious circumstances. In 2018, four days before Hunter was scheduled to start a tour with Silvana Estrada, her visa paperwork didn’t come through and she couldn’t enter the country. Hunter reached out to Woodward, whom he knew through their mutual friends in Snarky Puppy and she was game, even though they only had about 72 hours to build an entire setlist. Woodward says, “We went back and forth with about 30 ideas and came up with a set, had a two-hour rehearsal, and did our first show the same day.”

Each night on the tour became an exhilarating highwire walk for the two artists as they navigated the melodies, grooves and spaces of the songs they were covering, with arrangements that they’d often just cooked up on the way to the gig. Woodward recalls, “Many car rides were full of conversations like, ‘Let’s try this song tonight. What key? Let’s do it.’ That whole tour was just full of surprises. Charlie’s audiences embraced watching an experiment happen onstage.”

In November 2018, the pair recorded what they had been touring and working on all year. In just three days, they laid down the eleven tracks that comprise Music!Music!Music! with Derrek Phillips, drastically reworking songs ranging from the old-world blues of Blind Willie Johnson to the soul of Nina Simone, the wailing sound of Lucinda Williams to the technicolor funk of Terence Trent D’Arby. NPR hailed the duo’s collaboration as a “mind-blowing happy accident,” while All That Jazz described Hunter and Woodward’s chemistry as “enough to ignite a couple dozen Bunsen Burners.”

Hunter and Woodward toured all over the US, the UK and Europe in 2019; not even the agonizing kidney stones that Hunter endured during their first European jaunt could keep them off the road for long. “Charlie was in pain the entire time, but we only had to cancel one show in Berlin because he was in the emergency room,” Woodward recalls. By January 2020, they had accumulated enough material to begin recording their second album I’m a Stranger Here with New Orleans drummer Doug Belote, who had toured with Hunter and Woodward for much of the previous year. But during the initial recording sessions, they got the phone call that no artist wants to get – the first cancellation of a tour of China and Japan due to COVID-19. And as with many touring musicians around the world, this would be just the first in a long string of cancelled tours for them. I’m a Stranger Here includes reinterpretations of everything from early Steely Dan to The Cars and En Vogue to Willie Dixon.