Claudia Landell grew up with music all around her, making trips to Boston for piano lessons, singing in the church choir, and blowing obsessively into a harmonica in the woods behind the house where she grew up. In high school, she and her older sister used to play guitar and sing together. She would even write music to go with her sister’s poetry, until her sister told her to stop.
Her husband introduced her to bluegrass, and she picked up the bass. Over the years, she played in several bluegrass bands (most of which were named The “something-or-other” Boys). One band, The Pine Hill Ramblers, had a 15-year run playing almost every weekend during the summer at bluegrass festivals all over New England and Upstate New York. It was during that time Claudia took up the fiddle.
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Although she never got the hang of bluegrass fiddle, she did find jazz a comfortable place to be when she moved to the Seacoast area, and she has been writing jazz tunes at an alarming rate ever since. So far, no one has told her to stop.