Where the Music Leads: Adèle M. Wilding Closes One Chapter to Open Another
After a career spanning Manitoba, London, Vancouver, and beyond, Adèle M. Wilding looks back on the songs, places, and people that shaped her — before following the music in a new direction.
Above: Adèle M. Wilding is an award-winning jazz vocalist, composer, arranger, and educator whose career has taken her from Manitoba to the UK, Vancouver, and back home again for Jazz at the Fort Garry Hotel on Sunday, Oct. 4.
🎧 Listen Along: Adèle has curated a playlist of contemporary jazz vocalists who inspire her as both a performer and educator. Listen for the qualities she encourages emerging singers to explore — phrasing, vocal colour, improvisation, and the ability to make a song entirely their own. Listen to Adèle M. Wilding Selects on Spotify »
For Adèle M. Wilding, music has rarely followed a straight line. It began in Manitoba, in a home filled with different sounds.
Her mother was from Barbados, her father was English, and both were passionate listeners. Jazz shared space with classical music, Caribbean sounds and singers like Ella Fitzgerald, Cleo Laine, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, and Tony Bennett.
Long before Wilding thought seriously about becoming a jazz singer, listening had already become part of her education. Her own path toward jazz came gradually.
In 1991, while studying in Germany on scholarship, Wilding took part in an impromptu evening of music and sang Gershwin’s Summertime. Afterwards, people kept telling her the same thing: she should be singing more. She gave the people what they asked for.
Wilding eventually pursued vocal jazz alongside her career in education, completing a master’s degree in music education and, while living in the UK, a diploma in jazz and popular music studies at Goldsmiths University of London.
“That really launched my career as a vocal jazz artist and as a songwriter,” she recalls.
“I really enjoy the freeness that jazz offers us. I love the ability to scat or to embellish on a beautiful melody.”
The career that followed included two decades in the UK, performances across Western Canada, composing, arranging, teaching, and collaborations across jazz, blues, soul, and gospel. In 2005, she became the inaugural recipient of the BWA Nina Simone Award in London — particularly meaningful for a vocalist who counts Simone among her formative influences. Through it all, jazz gave Wilding room to explore and push the limits of expression.
“I really enjoy the freeness that jazz offers us. I love the ability to scat or to embellish on a beautiful melody.”
Now, she has reached another turning point: In 2026, Wilding decided to take her music in a different direction and step away from solo jazz performance for the foreseeable future. But she is careful not to call it a permanent goodbye.
“I never say forever and I never say never,” she says.
Instead, she wanted to mark the transition by looking back at the music and places that brought her here. That retrospective approach became the idea for her Full Circle show.
After performances in Vancouver and Edmonton, Wilding chose Winnipeg as the final stop — returning the story to the province where it began.
The concert itself follows her journey chronologically. Standards from the Great American Songbook sit alongside original compositions, with storytelling connecting songs to different periods in Wilding’s life: growing up in Manitoba, developing as a musician, building a career overseas, returning to Canada, and eventually finding her way home.
“Always follow your heart and your gut and never be afraid to take risks.”
“There absolutely will be a narrative,” she says. “We will be performing the songs chronologically as they appeared in my life.”
Many of the arrangements are Wilding’s own, alongside charts she has carried in her repertoire for decades. In that sense, Full Circle becomes something closer to a musical autobiography.
Above: Adèle M. Wilding performs a blend of vocal jazz, original music, and standards, drawing on a wide range of musical influences.
Some of its most personal chapters come through Wilding’s original songs.
Her Caribbean heritage has long been part of her musical identity, including through her Caribbean & Blue project, which blended contemporary jazz with Caribbean grooves. One song in the Winnipeg program is a tribute to her mother and Bathsheba, on the Atlantic coast of Barbados.
The idea came while Wilding was sitting beside a Japanese-style garden in Metro Vancouver. The surroundings brought back images of Barbados and memories of her mother, and she wrote the lyrics in less than half an hour.
It is a fitting example of how the places in Wilding’s life overlap through music — Manitoba, Barbados, London, and Vancouver connected through family, memory and song.
Vancouver became particularly important after she returned to Canada from the UK. Wilding spent five years there and describes it as a period when she began to truly come into her own as an artist.
Although, as many Manitobans can relate, the path brought her back to the prairie province. But coming home did not automatically mean knowing where she fit.
“I didn’t know how I was going to introduce myself into the local jazz scene,” Wilding says.
In 2022, she applied to perform at the TD Winnipeg International Jazz Festival. Jazz Winnipeg Artistic Director Zachary Rushing booked her.
“Zachary, who didn’t know me from a stranger, took a chance on me,” she recalls.
That appearance led to a Jazz at the Fort Garry Hotel performance in 2023 and another festival appearance in 2024.
“They do take a chance on their local artists while bringing in other artists to give us this wonderful musical tapestry here in Winnipeg.”
“It’s really beautiful to have a room where people are going to listen and you’re appreciated.”
Returning to The Club Room for the final stop of Full Circle now carries even more significance.
Wilding will be joined by Bert Johnson on piano, Karl Kohut on bass, and Monica Jones on saxophone — musicians she has worked with in different projects and settings over the years.
Adèle M. Wilding returns to The Club Room on October 4 for Full Circle, joined by Bert Johnson, Karl Kohut, and Monica Jones.
There will be standards, original songs, and stories from the road that brought her here. There will also be the uncertainty of closing one chapter without knowing exactly what the next one will become. And Wilding seems comfortable with that.
“Always follow your heart and your gut and never be afraid to take risks.”
It is advice she gives younger artists, but it also describes her own career — moving between countries, balancing education and performance, exploring different traditions and allowing her identity as an artist to change along the way.
And before she moves forward, Wilding wants to share this moment in a room together.
“Music is a healer, and music is one way to unite people,” she says. “We have this one moment where we can sit together and share in what is the beauty of live music.”
The timing adds one final layer: October 2026 marks 60 years since the Wilding family arrived in Canada after immigrating from England. Six decades later, Adèle is closing this chapter of her musical life in Manitoba — the place where she grew up listening and where the first pieces of her musical identity took shape.
Full Circle is a chance to hear that journey so far: the classics that influenced her, the original songs that carry family and memory, and the places and people that changed her along the way.
What comes next is deliberately less certain: Wilding is leaving room for another direction — and, as she has done throughout her career, seeing where the music leads.
Adèle M. Wilding presents Full Circle at Jazz at the Fort Garry on Sunday, October 4 at 7:00 PM. »
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“Jazz Winnipeg has been a huge part of my performing life,” says Adèle M. Wilding. After returning to Manitoba, she wasn’t sure how she would find her place in the local scene — until Jazz Winnipeg “took a chance” on her with a 2022 festival booking.
“They do take a chance on their local artists,” she says, “while bringing in other artists to give us this wonderful musical tapestry here in Winnipeg.”
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