Christy Baron | en

A jazz-pop singer as well as a theater and film actress, Christy Baron was born and raised in the Pittsburgh area but has lived around New York most of her adult life. Baron has said she appreciates pop, rock and R&B as well as jazz, and the artists she has expressed admiration for range from Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Dianne Reeves to Annie Lennox, Stevie Wonder and Sting. Baron was only five or six when she was first exposed to standards by her mother (a pianist) and started to sing and play them on the piano. By the time she was 16, Baron was singing standards in piano bars, and as a young adult in the early 1980s, she attended Carnegie Mellon University and often sang at a popular Pittsburgh jazz club called the Balcony. It was in 1984 that Baron moved to New York, where she pursued both acting and singing. In the 1990s, the lead characters that Baron played ranged from Julie Hammer in the film Pants on Fire (directed by Rocky Collins) to Stevie in a theatrical production of Eduardo Machado's Stevie Wants to Play the Blues at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Williamstown, MA. Directed by Jim Simpson (who married Sigourney Weaver), Stevie is loosely based on the life of Billy Tipton, a female jazz musician who passed herself off as a man. (Before Baron, Stevie had been played by Amy Madigan at a separate production in L.A.). Baron has also played the lead role of Fantine in a Broadway production of Les Miserables. In 1996, she signed with Chesky Records and recorded her debut album, I Thought About You. Steppin' followed in 2000. ~ Alex Henderson, All Music Guide .