Sofija Knezevic

There are singers who inhabit a song, and there are singers who are inhabited by it — who carry the whole weight of a tradition inside a single phrase and still leave room to surprise you. Sofija Knezevic belongs to the second kind. The New York Times has called her one of jazz's pre-eminent vocalists, noting that while her singing is steeped in tradition, her improvisational virtuosity and creativity are breathtaking. Harper's Bazaar has gone further, naming her one of the most significant singers in jazz today. These are not small claims. They are, however, earned ones.

 

A Prodigy's Beginning

Knezevic's story begins in Serbia, where she came up through rigorous classical training — piano, theory, composition, conducting — before turning her attention fully to jazz voice. At sixteen, an age when most musicians are still finding their instrument, she was invited to the University for Music and Performing Arts in Graz, Austria, on a full-tuition genius scholarship, becoming the youngest student ever admitted in the institution's history. She studied there under the jazz vocalist Dena DeRose, graduating with a degree in jazz voice and performance and a minor in classical singing and film scoring. It is the kind of biography that reads like preparation for something larger — and it was.

 

The Measure of a Career

What separates a fine singer from a defining one is not any single award, but the accumulation of a body of work that keeps demanding recognition. By that measure, Knezevic's career speaks for itself. Her last three albums — SOFIJAZZ, Live at The Bunker, and Silk Vol. 1 — were each in consideration for the Grammy Awards, a distinction that places her among a select company of vocalists whose recorded output is judged not against a moment, but against the standard of the art form itself. Each record has also collected honors on its own terms: SOFIJAZZ nominated for or awarded nine international music prizes; Live at The Bunker winning five with two nominations still pending; and Silk Vol. 1, recorded alongside pianist Orrin Evans and trombonist Elliot Mason, sweeping six awards in a single year, among them Best Original Score at the BHF Festival.

The honors extend well beyond her discography. She has received the Austrian Marianne Mendt Jazz Award, the Tesla Award for Achievements in Music, the Thailand International Jazz Voice Competition Award, three Golden Mermaid Awards, and a place in the Betty Carter Jazz Ahead program — a designation reserved for the artists the field itself believes will shape its next chapter. In 2021, she was named a City Artists Corps grantee. Elle Magazine placed her first on its "30 Under 30" list. It is, by any accounting, a formidable record — and one still being written.

 

A Teacher of Teachers

Knezevic has never treated performance and pedagogy as separate callings. Since settling in New York in 2011, she has taught voice at the Music School of New York City, the New School of Music, and Theater 13, and maintained a private studio guiding students from age five to fifty toward Broadway stages, conservatory auditions, and their own musical voices. Before New York, she held teaching posts in Serbia at the Nisville Jazz Academy and the Jazz High School in Subotica. Her master classes have taken her to Michigan State, Penn State, the University of Music Graz, and institutions across three continents, and she has been invited to speak on the art and history of voice at conferences from Montreal to London to Belgrade. To watch her teach is to understand that for Knezevic, singing was never meant to be hoarded — it was meant to be passed on.

 

The Written Word

That same instinct toward transmission runs through her writing. She is the author of the Evolution of Voice series — The Art of Breathing (2019) and The Art of Warming Up (2020) — and has contributed to the International Child Art Foundation, the Jazz Encyclopedia "Serbian Jazz, Bre!", and the newspaper Politika. As Editor-in-Chief of Jazzin' Magazine since 2011, she rebuilt the publication from the ground up and launched its English-language international edition, extending its reach well beyond the borders where it began.

 

On the Screen, In the Room

Knezevic's compositions have been commissioned by institutions of real consequence — the Museum of Modern Art's Summer Garden Series and the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas among them, much of it written in partnership with her husband, trombonist Elliot Mason. Her music has scored films including Love Comes After, The Eyes of My Children, Our Guardians/A Little Homage, and Hermann Vaske's Balkan Spirit, in which she appears alongside Marina Abramović and Angelina Jolie. A documentary devoted to her own life and work has also been made.

On the bandstand, she has stood among the best of her generation and the one before it — recording and performing with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, David Murray, Jason Moran, Sheila Jordan, Terence Blanchard, and Joe Lovano, among many others. She recently sang at the 150th anniversary opening concert of the National Theatre in Belgrade, and a forthcoming recording with Marsalis, Joey Calderazzo, John Patitucci, Herlin Riley, and Ryan Kisor is due for release later this year — a lineup that speaks plainly to where her peers believe she belongs.

 

A Voice for More Than Music

Knezevic serves as Creative Ambassador of Serbia Creates and as an ambassador for the International Child Art Foundation, Celiac Youth of Europe, and the Estée Lauder Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign, and she is recognized as an artist of the Amazon Aid Foundation. She is a member of the Recording Academy and serves as a Grammy University mentor — guiding, as she so often has, the artists who will come after her.