Allison Au

Alto Sax icon Alto Sax

Toronto, Ontario, Canada Birthplace

www.allisonau.com Website

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Allison Au is a Juno Award-winning saxophonist, composer, and arranger based in Toronto. She formed the Allison Au Quartet in 2009, shortly after graduating from Humber College, and won the Juno Award for Best Jazz Album: Group in 2016 for Forest Grove, with additional nominations in 2013 and 2019. In 2017, she won the TD Grand Prix de Jazz at the Montreal Jazz Festival. Her music fuses jazz with classical, Latin, pop, and R&B influences. Her ambitious 2023 album Migrations integrates vocals, strings, and poetry to explore her family's migration narratives, drawing from her mother's Polish Jewish heritage and her father's Malaysian background. She also participated in the Ostara Project, an all-female Canadian jazz collective nominated for a 2023 Juno. She has taught saxophone at the University of Toronto's Jazz Studies program since 2022.

Trivia

Au nearly pursued forensic science before a spontaneous audition for Humber College changed her direction. In 2011, she was one of only eight musicians selected internationally for the Metropole Orkest Arranger's Workshop in Holland, led by arranger Vince Mendoza. After her second album, she began piano lessons with Toronto pianist Frank Falco, whose teachings directly inspired much of the material on her third album, Wander Wonder. In 2018, SFJAZZ named her one of their "10 Rising Instrumentalists You Should Know."

Early Life

Allison Au was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in the mid-1980s to a Chinese father and a Jewish mother. Her parents were not musicians, but her father maintained an eclectic record collection that she explored as a child, developing an early love for Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole. Her maternal grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, and her father's family had migrated from Malaysia. She began studying piano at age six and attended the Claude Watson School for the Arts. In sixth grade she took up the clarinet, then switched to alto saxophone the following year, inspired by seeing Lisa Simpson play the instrument on television. She studied music at Humber College, graduating in 2009, and immediately formed the Allison Au Quartet with pianist Todd Pentney, bassist Jon Maharaj, and drummer Fabio Ragnelli.