Madison Cunningham’s impact on the Vancouver jazz scene

Madison Cunningham is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from California. In September 2022 she released Revealer, which went on to win a Grammy for Best Folk Album, and toured its music to Vancouver at the Biltmore Cabaret.

Tonight, January 9th, Cunningham plays the Vogue Theatre in support of her latest album, Ace. Cherokee alt-country artist Ken Pomeroy will play an opening set.

When Ace came out in October 2025, I noticed the enduring influence of Cunningham's Biltmore show on our scene, three years later. I hadn't attended the show, but I recently interviewed nine musicians in the Vancouver jazz scene who did. Their memories speak to what we look for in live music, and their thoughts on Cunningham's evolving artistry place tonight's show in context.

The Biltmore show took place on September 27th, 2022. It's not the most recent time Cunningham played Vancouver; on October 22nd, 2023, she opened for Hozier at Rogers Arena. Nor was it her first: she opened for Amos Lee at The Centre on August 21st, 2019, right after releasing her album Who Are You Now.

Saxophonist Steve Kaldestad, who teaches at Capilano University's jazz program, had already learned of Cunningham. He credited the great Ontario guitarist Reg Schwager for the tip. "[Schwager] posts great music on Facebook," Kaldestad said. "He would post bossa nova things and obscure choro music, because he's kind of a Brazilian music scholar. He posted – I'm dead sure it was him posting – Madi covering 'California' by Joni Mitchell."

Cunningham uploaded that video in July 2019 in advance of releasing Who Are You Now.

Kaldestad was an instant fan, and he wasn't alone. "Morgan Childs commented on [Schwager's] post. It was some Toronto and Vancouver people seeing this post and commenting on it, so from there I went down the rabbit hole. Anything that she released, I would check it out."

Vocalist and arts administrator Cindy Dai-Thiessen also discovered Cunningham around that time. Even after graduating from CapU, Dai-Thiessen said she was "influenced by the people around me. We all used to just say, oh, have you checked out this artist or that artist?"

Who Are You Now's first track, "Pin It Down", was out as a single in advance of the album release. Cunningham's guitar riff and arranging sensibility on this track is the stuff of jazz students' dreams.

Meredith Louise is a vocalist who performs R&B and neo-soul music. "I just became utterly obsessed with 'Pin It Down'," she said. "To me that was like her 'Neon', like John Mayer's 'Neon'."

Louise found Cunningham to be a sort of complete musician, an aspirational figure: "just her range and dexterity, not only as a incredible guitarist, but you know, melding between genres: sort of jazz and rock and folk and almost psychedelic in a way."

"I got into her stuff right before 'Pin It Down' came out," said Dante André-Kahan, a guitarist who recently moved from Vancouver to Victoria. He told me about how the Biltmore show offered relief from hard times he was going through in 2022.

"I knew that seeing Madi was gonna be non-negotiable for me, because I’d been a fan of hers since 2019," he said.

At CapU about a year later, pianist Jancis Bautista was next to spread the word. "I shared that record to everyone I was talking to around covid times," Bautista told me via Instagram. "It was definitely a covid find, just wanting to listen to anything other than jazz since I finished the semester of my fourth year."

Vocalist Teresa Marie, also a student then, said Bautista "posted 'Pin it Down', and I was like, let me take a listen, and I was hooked. That entire album is so... I feel like everyone's always like, Revealer is the best one. But [Who Are You Now], it has a special place in my heart. I've listened it top to bottom so many times."

Revealer, Cunningham's Grammy-winning follow-up to Who Are You Now, is perhaps best known for its tender song dedicated to her grandmother.

"I remember seeing a YouTube video of her singing 'Life According to Raechel'," trumpeter Chris Berner said of when he discovered Cunningham's music. "It was acoustic, it was her in her bedroom or something. I'm going, holy crap, this is amazing."

"When she played it live at the Biltmore, you could hear a pin drop," Louise said. "It was a real Joni Mitchell song. It felt like something Joni would be proud of, lyrically and just so deeply, devastatingly sad, and also incredibly beautiful."

Vocalist Tess Meckling made the same comparison. "I feel like there's a common thread between a Joni Mitchell style of writing and her writing," she said. "It feels like she's talking to you like she's an old friend or something, and it's not showy. She has this sort of subtle grunge and subtle coolness to her, but it's not overdone."

"It touched a lot of people, and I think that says a lot about an artist's songwriting skills," Marie said about the song.

"'Life According to Raechel' is beyond sublime," Kaldestad said. "It's absolutely gorgeous. That's a really special tune."

In September 2022, vocalist Kayla Price's first semester at CapU included Kaldestad's ear training class. "He talked about Madison Cunningham," Price said. "Oh, she's such a cool artist, I love her music, you guys should go to her concert."

Price and her friend in the class "decided, you know what? I'm turning 19 in the middle of September, she turned 19 in August. We were like, we're gonna go to this Madison Cunningham show together, and it's gonna be really cool. Before getting my tickets for that show, before Steve had mentioned Madison Cunningham, I had never heard of her. But I listened to Revealer all the way through before seeing the show, and I really liked it."

Meckling's rock band, Sugarfungus, played the university's CapU Street Party on September 6th, 2022. Revealer came out three days later. "That Biltmore show was a party for Cap people," Meckling said. "It felt like we all decided that we liked her and that we were all gonna go. It was fun to look around and everywhere you turned, you saw someone you knew."

The closest match on record for what we might have heard at the Biltmore is Cunningham's NPR Tiny Desk set aired August 10th, 2022. The musicians with her – keyboardist Philip Krohnengold, bassist Daniel Rhine, and drummer Kyle Crane – continued on to record Ace; they're likely all playing tonight.

Cunningham opened the Biltmore show with the same song she used to kick off that Tiny Desk: Revealer's "All I've Ever Known", featuring another killer guitar part. Price, newly 19 years old and having barely attended any local shows yet, named that song as one of her favourites for its engaging lyrics. "[The Biltmore] was very much a first and unknown to us, but we got there and we ended up having a great time, you know, listening to 'All I've Ever Known'," Price said.

Dai-Thiessen attended with several close friends who shared a musical aim. "It was the kids who did the jazz-school thing, and had the jazz degrees, but also wanted to explore their own voices outside of the academy. It felt like a party. It felt like a hang after a recital, or a hang after school, but at our really cool friend Madison's living-room concert."

Louise, however, hadn't met any of the interviewees in this story yet: she went by herself just one month after moving from Australia. "I booked the ticket just before I moved here," she said, "knowing that I would see Madison Cunningham for less than 30 dollars. It was in this place [the Biltmore] that I'd only heard good things about, and it was like a basement venue. That show reminds me of first moving to Vancouver, and being here and getting to know the music community of Vancouver."

"I was just starting out gigging and going to shows again after covid," Marie said. "I felt like everyone I knew was at that show. It was so sick."

André-Kahan recounted his friend Marie's role in the show's encore. "Teresa called out over the entire Biltmore. She was like, can you please do ‘Song in my Head’ [originally released on Who Are You Now], that would be nice! Just totally unafraid to put herself out there. Then Madi started the first line of 'Song in my Head' and everybody just lost it. It was amazing."

"Dante and I met her at the end of the show," Marie said, "and she was like, I was just thinking about that song. And I was like, thank God!" (André-Kahan then took the photo that appears at the top of this article.)

"She’s incredible at balancing dynamics with her guitar and her voice," André-Kahan said. "Her voice is so much more powerful than what you hear on the record, like her ability to get loud and hold a pitch, and just everything."

Berner remembered the exact date of the Biltmore show in our interview, as he debuted his big band that same week. "I saw Madison on the Tuesday night," he said. "Then I had a rehearsal with my band on the Wednesday night, like the day after, so I chatted with Steve [Kaldestad] a little bit about it, because he was there."

Berner, ever the large ensemble composer-arranger, appreciated details within each composition like "odd time signatures. I hadn't heard a ton of that – and it was cool to hear a lot of five and seven [5/8 and 7/8 time] – in I'll say a non-jazz setting, or a non-instrumental setting."

Louise concurred that Cunnningham "writes with rhythm in mind. She's writing so rhythmically, her melodies are so rhythmic. I always try to do that with my own writing, thinking about the rhythm section when I'm writing."

The new album Ace is "very dark in a way that Revealer and Who Are You Now, they're not dark like this," André-Kahan said.

"It's so different to the other two albums," Louise said. "The introduction of having woodwinds on the album: there's oboe, there's flute, there's clarinet, like an art-folk-rock album. I find it such an interesting departure from her previous albums: her shattering into pieces and rebuilding herself again. 'Take Two', I think, is my favourite song on the album so far. And also 'Break the Jaw.'"

Cunningham played "Break the Jaw" on Jimmy Kimmel Live! the week of Ace's release date.

On Kimmel, Krohnengold was still there on keys, but Jesse Chandler joined them with a bass clarinet. Kaldestad pointed out another instrument on a stand in front of his fellow reedist. "There's so much bass clarinet on this album. I saw them on Kimmel, and [Chandler is] playing B-flat clarinet. It's an indie band, and she's got a frickin’ licorice stick with one of the four or five people on stage. Wow! Like, what? Bass clarinet is alternative and indie; B-flat clarinet, not so much. But she pulled it off."

Berner said of Ace, "I hear a lot more textural and colour things as well, with the bass clarinet and the flute and the clarinet, the woodwinds in there. That's something that really drew my ear to this record, is hearing some different textures. It's a lot of what I like to try and include in my arrangements or compositions. I hear a lot of what I like in music: space, pauses, extending the form."

As part of the media campaign between the album release and the start of her tour, Cunningham played and spoke on the NPR show World Cafe hosted by Raina Douris. Her set, aired on December 11th, included "Break the Jaw" with just her own nylon-string acoustic guitar accompaniment (video time: 28:30).

I was delighted to hear this number featuring precise, thoughtful guitar. It had all the attributes that drew me to Cunningham in the first place: undeniable musicianship from the full conception of arrangements down to the intricate parts, always coming across like a live performance.

In 2024, I heard a live set by someone else who made me feel the same way: Juana Molina, who played solo on the jazzfest's downtown stage using a guitar and many effects. Molina operates in a more experimental world, yet Cunningham has long cited her as an influence, and they performed together on tour around that jazzfest season. (Molina released a fine new album, Doga, a month after Cunningham did.)

Cunningham put more piano, which she played during other numbers in the World Cafe set, into Ace than ever. Meckling appreciated this approach. "I grew up playing classical piano, and so in a lot of these songs, I can hear that influence in there as well. It's really cool to hear that different side of her, but also this sort of rage and willingness to lay it all out on the table. I think I heard that a lot more in this album: a really pure, emotional release."

Throughout the media tour, Cunningham says she feels more like herself, finding her own sound, on Ace than ever before. I believe her, and also I admit that some of these lush sonic choices – piano, orchestration of wind instruments, layers – have overrun my favourite things about her previous work. The Molina-esque side of it isn't there as much; I feel it's further from those of us whom Dai-Thiessen called "kids who did the jazz-school thing [...] but also wanted to explore their own voices".

Of course, it's simply an artist continuing to evolve her direction. Dai-Thiessen said Cunningham "really put her whole self into through-composing this album. It feels very much like a story from top to tail."

"She puts so much care into the parts that go into her songs," Marie said. "Guitar parts, I mean, all these instrumentals, the beautiful strings."

"I really appreciate how she's striving to tell the truth, like with a capital T, with what she does musically," André-Kahan said.

Kaldestad said Ace is his new favourite Cunningham record. "The thing that shines in a musician for me is how they're genuine, and they're pursuing music not for their own ego but just because they want to be a part of it, and it's something bigger than us. I feel like there's a real humility baked in with Madison's output."

Kaldestad recognized in Cunningham an ethos that he and his generation hold dear: "working on your craft, and the success will come, but it's not success-driven: it's just process-driven and authentic."

"She's not a jazz musician, but she's all the things we love."