Eva Kesselring has been performing on Greek stages for nearly two decades with her band In Touch…with Eva Kesselring, which she started seventeen years ago, yet in a country that lavishes attention on its singers, her name is hardly known and is about to release her first album after all these years. Eva Kesselring is a jazz singer.
“My main repertoire exceeds 300 titles and I love every one of these songs–or else I wouldn’t bother singing them,” she says.
Born in Zurich, the Greek-Swiss Kesselring moved to Greece in 1974. She started out in television, co-hosting a weekly music show on state television. She also took singing lessons with Ellie Paspala and worked as a production and stage manager before enrolling in London's Mountview Theatre School to study acting and musical theater. In 1990, Kesselring returned to Athens, where she performed in productions like Collin Higgins’s Harold and Maude, in which she played Mary.
Four years later, she made a slight career shift and has since been known as the woman who gave a voice to the Greek jazz circuit. She has been described by music critics like George Haronitis as “one of the most powerful jazz interpreters the local scene has to offer”. The lead vocalist of In Touch, she collaborates with guitarist, bassist, and saxophonist Gerassimos Anastassopoulos, with a lineup that spans classics, blues, French chansons and bossa nova.
“Still, I suppose one might say the core of my rep is firmly rooted in what is known as ‘The Great American Songbook’–Cole Porter being a particular favorite,” she says. “Naturally, I also sing  a very large portion of jazz standards that span from the 1930s to the 1960s and beyond–so anything from Dixie and Stride to the post-Be-bop era.”
Kesselring appears regularly in Athens clubs like Ginger, Public, Parafono Jazz & Blues Club and Half Note, and has also toured abroad. Recently, she has been touring with pianist Sami Amiris as a duo, “Jazz the Two of Us”, making several appearances this winter at the Divani Caravel’s Browns Cigar Lounge. Kesselring is also putting together her first album with Amiris.
Being a stage actress, Kesselring says she has also covered a number of show tunes–many of which are considered jazz standards anyway. “Beyond these, great loves include cabaret in the vein of Kurt Weil or Randy Newman, French chansons–as sung by Brel, Piaf, Nougaro, Montand, Aznavour–and, last but by no means least, my undying love for Brazilian music (all the way from Tom Jobim and Joao Gilberto to Ivan Lins and Djavan.”
Jazz may not have as large a following in Greece as it does elsewhere, but it is a loyal following. The genre also has a longer history in Greece than most might think. “Until the collapse of the military regime in 1974, there was not a bouzouki to be heard,” says Kesselring; instead, it was jazz that filled the musical void. “Old Greek movies of cinema’s golden era were filled with jazz.” Then in the 1980s, jazz lost its mass appeal and somehow acquired a more high-brow or eclectic image. "Some Greek musicians–to maximize their stature–portrayed jazz as tough, intellectual music."
Jazz is winning back fans. Audiences at In Touch’s shows are larger than ever. “Jazz has become trendier. People come from all walks of life, twenty-year-old kids to 70-year-olds.”
Kesselring likens jazz to the Greek musical genre known as laiko (the people’s): “it’s about heartbreak, love, happiness and dreams–what all popular songs are about.”
In addition to her jazz repertoire, she has another musical “project, completely unrelated to [jazz] , that has to do with American "folk" songs of the 1960s and 1970s–Gordon Lightfoot, Bob Dylan, James Taylor, Peter, Paul & Mary, Crosby Stills, Nash & Young, Don McLean, John Denver, Joan Baez.” And she continues to be involved  in music and theater. “Actors often consider me a singer who acts and singers as an actor who sings, but jazz is still my staple.”
On stage, Kesselring mixes different moods and music styles. “I treat every song like a play. The nicest thing anyone has ever said to me was by a Romanian woman: ‘Watching you perform is like watching someone open a matryoshka doll–each song, another doll’.”
Years of performing have taught Kesselring that audiences need “that change of gear.” But they also want the familiar too: “people always request ‘Summertime’.”  She adds: “I like to mix it up, the obscure stuff, the bebop, everything. But I admit, I always end with 'Dream a Little Dream of Me’. Who doesn't love that one?”