Miranda Ferriss Jones was raised in Monkton, Vermont in an old farmhouse, on a dirt road with a mountain behind her and cows across the street. At age 2 she started singing with her father- once a jazz flutist and a state cop. He recognized her talent early on and decided she would be a ski racer and jazz singer. Her early years were spent on the icy slopes of the east coast and at the piano where she would sing Burt Bacharach, Ashford and Simpson, Nina Simone and the Little Mermaid.
Throughout high school her love for performance burgeoned. She starred in every high school and community theatre performance she could find and made her money singing with a local rock band at the Holiday Inn. She still ski raced, but not enthusiastically or particularly well.
She graduated and went off to Yale University where she left that country Miranda behind, ditched her microphone and ski boots, and immersed herself into the theatre. She performed in over 20 undergraduate and graduate productions and traveled to London to study Shakespeare. She felt artistic, profound, and so on.
During her senior year the Yale world of acapella offered a free world tour for anyone in the elite group ‘Whim N’ Rhythm’. That sounded pretty good, so she auditioned and got in. And, while touring through Japan and Croatia, she remembered that she was born to sing.
Post grad, she joined her muse at the time in Oberlin, Ohio (note ‘Eva and I’). She worked as a waitress and rediscovered jazz with some of today’s most brilliant young jazz musicians (check out Theo Croker and Kassa Overall). After three months she felt happy, but stagnant and so left to try out the life of a rising broadway actress in NYC.
She pounded the pavement lightly and landed a role in a regional production of ‘Shout the Mod Musical’. The next five months were spent in a blond wig and go-go boots, singing ’60’s hits such as ‘Downtown’ and ‘Son of A Preacher Man.’ After performances she would hang out with a local crew of gentlemen in the band Walri. She found that jamming with them was more fun than doing the same show over and over again.
So, when her contract ended, she returned to NYC, started piano lessons, and began writing music. That same year she recorded her first EP, ‘Miranda Ferriss Jones’.
She is now living in San Francisco where she gigs around the Bay Area and is in the process of recording and producing her jazz/cabaret opera, ‘The Precipice’.