Vanessa Collier

“Icarus”

“There’s a young lady [Vanessa Collier] came onstage with me, I forget where I was, but she’s playing an alto saxophone, and man, she was amazing.”
– Buddy Guy

Fresh off winning a 2020 Blues Music Award (BMA) for Instrumentalist – Horn Player of the Year for the second year in a row (2020 and 2019), Vanessa Collier released her highly anticipated and self-produced fourth album, Heart on the Line, in August 2020. Vanessa is a multi-award-winning songwriter, master musician, and multi-instrumentalist, known for weaving together funk, soul, rock, and blues musical styles. Vanessa blends musical styles seamlessly with soulful vocals, searing saxophone solos, and witty and award-winning songwriting skills.
 
Vanessa started playing saxophone in the fourth grade and was in every school, all-county, and all-state band possible, while also playing AAU basketball, lettering all four years on her varsity basketball team, and graduating high school with honors. After high school, Vanessa earned a scholarship to attend the prestigious Berklee College of Music, where she graduated with dual degrees in Performance and Music Production and Engineering. Vanessa has toured extensively, both nationally and internationally, and has released three critically acclaimed albums prior to 2020’s Heart on the Line (2014’s Heart, Soul & Saxophone; 2017’s Meeting My Shadow; and 2018’s Honey Up). Honey Up spent 9 weeks on the Top 15 Billboard Charts, three months on the Living Blues Report, and is currently spinning on Sirius XM.

Drawing once again on her music production and engineering degree from Berklee, Vanessa’s self-produced Heart on the Line includes eight new original songs, all written by Vanessa, as well as three re-imagined covers. Vanessa’s stories are delivered with incredible musicianship, gorgeous horn arrangements, and with engineering and production detail that is second to none.