Stella Bass

Stella studied music from a young age, starting piano accordion lessons at five, followed by singing and piano, both through the Royal Irish Academy of Music. After school, she received a degree in Computer Science from University College Dublin, and in 2017 completed a Master’s Degree in Music in Dublin’s Conservatory of Music. With music performances halted during the pandemic, Stella used this unexpected downtime to further her education, studying Music Production with Logic Pro in Berklee College Boston, and Music Composition & Arranging with Studio Orchestrations in Belfast. Separate to her work as an artist, she has started writing and producing music for the TV/Film world and in early 2023 placed a 10-track album with Warner-Chappell Music Producion in Nashville, a global leader in sync/library music.

Summer 2023 will see the release of Stella’s second studio album, a collaboration with the acclaimed Johnny Taylor Trio, featuring a mix of jazz standards and new compositions. It was back in 2014 that she released her first album “Too Darn Hot” to critical acclaim; it featured standards from Cole Porter and Jerome Kern, as well as newly-arranged songs by Amy Winehouse and Robert Palmer. Upon hearing Stella’s album cover of her daughter’s song Back to Black, Amy Winehouse’s mother got in touch with Stella directly to say how much she loved it, and indeed that Stella’s album was being played non-stop in her house! The album gets regular radio airplay – it was Album of the Week on Ireland’s national RTE Lyric FM, and has since made waves on jazz stations in the UK, the USA, Germany and Switzerland. No stranger to the art of the Big Band, Stella sings with the HotHouse Big Band, has recorded with the Dublin City Jazz Orchestra, and has her own quartet with whom she tours.

In tandem with her musical studies, many years of singing in musical theatre, bands and cabarets helped Stella finely-tune her craft, and her versatile repertoire crosses over jazz, classical and musical theatre, though she is still most at home singing her beloved jazz standards, inspired by her big influences, Ella Fitzgerald and Barbra Streisand.