• Karen Lano is a French-based singer with a captivating, silky voice, and ‘My Name Is Hope Webster’ is her striking debut album, which blends jazz, rock and singer-songwriter folk. She has a real talent for composing bright but strange songs, as if from the darker side of fairy tales - and for intriguing interpretations of other song-writers’ material, including on this album : Neil Young, Tom Waits, and Hoagy Carmichael.

• She is joined by two leading jazz musicians : bassist Daniel Yvinec and trumpeter Michael Leonhart, who between them played all the instruments and were also producers. Leonhart has toured and recorded with Steely Dan, and a vast list of leading artists; Yvinec, one of the busiest musician-producers in France, oversaw 2009’s acclaimed ‘Around Robert Wyatt’ album with the composer and the Orchestre National de Jazz.

• Lano wanders like a mixture of Kate Bush and Peggy Lee in a movie by Tim Burton or Jane Campion. Her limpid voice, full of vivacity, is one minute leading bouncing melodies from the American Songbook, and next the downbeat urban landscape of Waits’ ‘Heart of Saturday Night’, to Young’s plaintive ‘Don’t Let it Bring You Down’, and a stunning version of ‘Skylark’, all interspersed with her own wistful compositions.

• Karen Lano was born of a French father and German-Hungarian pianist mother, and musically bought up listening to film music, shows, musicals and French chanson including Serge Gainsbourg and Barbara, before discovering her own pop and rock heroes from The Beatles, Elvis Costello and Nirvana to Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright and Camille - to which she would add Carmen McRae, Shirley Horn, Blossom Dearie & many more.