It's the dream, isn't it, to get up on the karaoke stage only to realise that singing is your calling? For most, it will only ever be a dream, but for Ehran Jade it was reality.
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Jade was studying cinematography at Canberra Institute of Technology when one night - while trying to scout a film location in Civic - she came across her first karaoke night at PJ O'Reilly's.
"Having not seen one before, I thought I'd stick around, and eventually, I worked up the courage to do a song," she says.
"Even though I was about 20, I was listening to a lot of jazz at the time. And I was looking through the book starting at the letter A and found At Last and was like 'great, I know that one'. But of course, it's quite a challenging song vocally.
"I had enormous stage fright and I still remember feeling my hands shaking and my knees knocking whilst I was up there. But it was exhilarating and I kept going back for more."
Armed with her newfound love of performing at karaoke knights, Jade decided to record a song as part of a project for her film course. After hearing the track, her teacher suggested Jade jump onto CIT's music course to complete simultaneously with her film qualification.
"It was quite a steep learning curve, but one of my fondest memories of Canberra is the fact that I discovered just how much I loved music and singing," she says.
"Canberra's always very special to me because of that."
The rest is history, so they say, and Jade now performs regularly with her band Ehran Jade and Her High Standards, as well as having a career as a cinematographer, based in Sydney.
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She returns to Canberra this weekend for an evening of jazz from the 1930s, 40s and 50s at Molly - a bar that Jade loves to perform at because it matches her vintage style.
"When I found the venue, I just thought, this is just perfect for the kind of night that we want to host for people," she says.
"Because it's not just about the music, but it's great to just have an atmosphere, the ambience that goes with the kind of vibe that we're creating at the same time."
The vibe that Jade refers to extends to not only the music and venue but her overall look, with the singer known for donning vintage clothing in her everyday life.
"It just feels very authentic to me. The clothes I wear aren't the costume, they're the clothes that I feel most like myself in," she says.
"The music, I suppose is an extension of that. It suits my voice, I can get lost in it. I just love that. So to be able to create an evening for an audience where I can maybe for just a moment, take them back, let them forget about the world outside and feel like they're having this classical step back in time.
"We do like to take people on a little bit of a musical journey. So there are some tunes that people will be more familiar with, like Amy Winehouse, or a couple of songs from The Bee Gees and others, but we put our style on that. That sort of fits with the jazz songs that we do as well."
Ehran Jade and Her High Standards will be at Molly on Sunday. To book, go to molly.bar.
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