Singer Patti Austin will perform Wednesday, February 7th, in Los Angeles as part of Grammy Week festivities. The veteran vocalist will be the special guest performer with the Gibson/Baldwin Grammy Jazz Ensembles, a group of the top high school jazz musicians and vocalists from across the country. The show takes place at Catalina's Jazz Club in Hollywood, and serves as a fundraiser for the Grammy Foundation.

 Austin is preparing for the March 13th release of her live big band album, Avant Gershwin, which is part of a series of projects she plans to record with the WDR Big Band in Germany.

The singer says she also plans to record a pop-oriented studio album before the end of the year, and notes that the process for recording that type of project is very different from the pre-production work required for the big band outings: "When we're doing pop stuff I tend to work like Quincy (Jones), I guess it's from working with Quincy for a thousand years. So it tends to be more of a collaborative environment where you have the musicians come in and you play the tunes that are gonna be done, you can kind of the musicians the tunes and then we come up with how it's going to be done. As opposed to picking the tunes, going to an arranger, he arranges everything, the band comes in, he plays it down, boom." 

For more information on Patti, visit her website by Clicking Here.