Listening to Elysia Biro

Few people with roots as "jazz musicians" get their names on billboards. Yet Elysia Biro, whose EP Running From Nothing came out on Universal Music Canada and Deutsche Grammophon two weeks ago, did.

Biro is a vocalist and pianist from Vancouver Island, born circa 2000. Running From Nothing features five songs, all of which she wrote solo or co-wrote. Though it's not technically her very first release, it's billed as her debut, and certainly it represents a step change in her already eventful young career.

In 2020, Biro obtained her Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies from Vancouver Island University (VIU). where her peers included Shruti Ramani, Teighan Couch, and Keanu Ienco. She was known on campus as a talented pianist, classically trained. VIU shut down its jazz program after the 2023-24 academic year.

Biro's earliest Instagram post available at the time of writing shows her at the Corner Lounge in Nanaimo to play a gig circa 2016. In the next couple years, performing mononymously as Elysia, she played more venues including Nanaimo's Modern Cafe and Vancouver's Railway Club.

One Elysia song, "Take the Memories", was produced by Canadian popular music legend Bob Rock and came out in 2020. Biro's low voice and command of soul-pop arrangements is already apparent.

Biro left Nanaimo for the U.K. in the early 2020s and earned a Master of Music degree from the University of York. She began posting short videos of jazz piano transcription highlights, some of which reached and retained a growing audience. This experience provided the foundation for her career as a solo artist, in terms of that audience and also the production skills needed to make the videos.

The most-featured artist in what Biro would call "Transcription Tuesdays" was the pianist Red Garland, in cuts like "What Is This Thing Called Love?" from Garland's own trio plus tracks from Miles Davis' first quintet. Other featured artists included Bill Evans, Bird, Oscar Peterson (Biro considers the series to have started with a take of "C Jam Blues"), and Ahmad Jamal's "But Not For Me". However, perhaps the most-viewed entry featured 2023's "Glue Song" by English pop artist Beabadoobee.

One original song from this chapter of Biro's career is "My Love", as heard on this 2023 German live TV performance. Comping and later soloing on an upright piano, Biro leads a trio through an R&B-jazz ballad, eyeing the lens of the camera and singing with inflections that recall a popular English artist of the 2000s, Dido.

In late 2023, Biro covered "The Look of Love" by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. "[M]y parents would always play Dianna [sic] Krall and Shelby Lynne's version of this song in my living room as a child so I've always loved it!" Biro wrote in the YouTube description. Krall, the previous generation's Vancouver Island-raised jazz pianist with a contralto voice and pop success, titled one of her best-known albums after the song.

However, Biro's music is rarely adjacent to Krall's; she aligns more with other like-minded artists of her generation. Among them would be Katie Tupper – who is from Saskatoon, released her first album this year, and at live shows often employs Vancouverites like Ben Millman and Alvin Brendan – to Best New Artist Grammy-winner Olivia Dean. Biro has covered Dean, and her lead single from Running From Nothing, "Just Wait a Minute", is a good match for the English artist's intimate retro-R&B.

She filmed the video in a west-coast forest, just as Krall came from Nanaimo. But the further the presentation veers from the piano, the further the positioning of Biro's EP moves toward that of Dean, Beebadoobee, and back through Corinne Bailey Rae or the aforementioned Dido. Biro's decision to spend formative years in the U.K. feels resonant, given the comparison to all those English artists.

Now Biro is based in Los Angeles. She has a frequent collaborator there in producer Alex Bone, who has worked with the likes of Tom Misch, Cory Wong, and Tiny Habits, the soft vocal pop trio featuring Vancouver-raised Maya Rae. Bone co-wrote (with another co-writer who has credits on the EP, Adam Friedman) the upbeat soul-pop track "Gentleman Blue", which could fit right alongside the music of Maggie Rogers.

At an outsize total of over 400,000 views, it's no surprise that comments under this video reference the use of video ads to promote it. Biro embraced that in a personal response to the top comment: "thank you for giving the song a chance <3 It really really means the world".

Across several months before Running From Nothing came out, Biro teased many of the tracks in her own solo video takes. One of those was "Fool's Gold", where on the EP, an LA band including Larry Goldings on organ and Jeff Parker ETA IVtet drummer Jay Bellerose backs her.

The upright bass arrangement, chord choices, and falling vocal runs (that Dua Lipa "Levitating" thing) on the title track, "Running From Nothing", bring the sound closer to contemporary jazz.

"I think I fell in love with the idea of jazz being such an improvisational and open format," Biro said on CBC's On The Coast with Gloria Macarenko. "Sort of coming off the page, and I love the idea of being able to sit down and just play and improvise, and I loved the genre." She continued in the April 30th interview about learning to play jazz in her teens, around the time she enrolled at VIU.

"[Running From Nothing] really represents a lot of different things for me. I think there's sort of a series of letters to my younger self," Biro said in the interview. That brings us to the pop ballad "Wish I Were Better" and its widescreen video.

"You'll go as far as you think that you're able / 'til you find your feet and your heart are more stable / and maybe one day you'll regret / all of the love that you left," Biro sings. Though these lyrics must point toward a lover who moved on, can they not also be autobiographical? Biro's work has moved at a whirlwind pace since her teens, taking her from Nanaimo to England to California: from those forests and beaches, and her mic'd up bedroom, to billboards and LA studios under Universal Music Canada. Should her career continue at this speed without interruption, her future projects would promise to say something about what she might feel she left behind along the way.

Wish I were better. Isn't it such a Gen-Z line? In the arena where Biro built an audience via Transcription Tuesdays, you're never really good enough and have to find a way to not think about it. (Biro is not as comparable to Caity Gyorgy as she is to Tupper, Dean, et al., but the three-time Juno-winner also of course reached people early on through jazz lift videos, albeit on a dedicated account at a greater frequency.) But she's been ready for the job, keeping good humour in her persona, encouraging fans to trace the roots of her pop artistry to Red Garland piano videos and Vancouver Island.

The resources and strategy behind Biro's career may, through no fault of her own, shape her into a less out-and-out Canadian artist. Since this EP is not of and for the national jazz scene, it would be a dark horse at the 2027 Junos for Vocal Jazz Album of the Year (though it could easily get nominated in one of many categories), but that doesn't seem to be the goal here.

Biro plays select Canadian jazz festivals in June and July, including a ticketed show at Victoria's Studio 919 on June 21st as well as Winnipeg (June 18th), Toronto (June 24th), Calgary (June 27th), Montreal (June 29th), and Halifax (July 10th).