Lehigh Valley Music
Written by John J. Moser
A Parkland High School graduate and former Allentown resident has been nominated for a Grammy Award – her second in three years.
Denise Donatelli, who grew up in South Whitehall Township and graduated from Parkland in 1968, was nominated for Best Jazz Vocal Album for Savant Records release “Soul Shadows,” her fourth album.
The awards, announced Wednesday night, will be handed out at the 55th Grammy Awards ceremony Feb. 10 in Los Angeles.
If Donatelli wins, she would be the first person from Lehigh or Northampton counties to win a Grammy for performance, according to the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, organizers of the Grammys.
The album faces stiff competition. Also nominated in the category are “Live” by veteran pop/jazz singer Al Jarreau and The Metropole Orkest, and “Radio Music Society” by Esperanza Spalding, who won the Grammy for Best New Artist in 2011.
Rounding out the nominees are “1619 Broadway: The Brill Building Project” by Kurt Elling and “The Book Of Chet” by Luciana Souza.
Donatelli also was nominated for Best Jazz Vocal Album in 2011 for her last album, “When Lights are Low,” but it lost to Dee Dee Bridgewater’s “Eleanora Fagan (1915-1959): To Billie With Love From Dee Dee.”
That disc also had a nomination for the disc’s arranger and pianist Geoffrey Keezer for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist. But that award went to Christopher Tin for “Baba Yetu,” a track from Christopher Tin, Soweto Gospel Choir & Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s disc “Calling All Dawns.”
Donatelli now not only has been nominated for her past two albums, but the honors come just seven years into her recording career.
After college, Donatelli married and lived in Allentown until the 1980s. She moved to Atlanta, where she started performing professionally, and then to Los Angeles, where she recorded her first CD, “In the Company of Friends,” in 2005.
Donatelli has also had spots singing for episodes of “The Simpsons,” “Frasier” and Turner Classic Movies, and in commercials for CNN, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz and others.