Highlights

 

Tessa Corwell grew up above her parents' hardware shop in Halifax, Nova Scotia, practising scales on an upright piano that had crossed the Atlantic on a cargo ship from Glasgow. She studied piano and voice in Montreal, then spent two years as the pianist and singer of a ship's lounge, crossing between the Caribbean and the Canadian Maritimes and writing songs on deck after the last set.

Back on land she taught piano by day and played hotel lobbies by night, and in 1995 recorded her first album in a church hall on the Halifax waterfront. Montreal and a string quartet came next, then a live record from a snowed-in winter concert, a theatre commission and a Christmas album with a children's choir.

In 2007 she came to Lisbon for one winter and never left. The city's light, its stairs and its old cafes run through her later records, a summer of Thursday nights at a seaside hotel in Cascais became her band, The Esplanade Five, and a long stay in Salvador and Recife gave her the songs of Postcards from Brazil. These days she plays every Wednesday at a small bar in Alfama, teaches a Saturday piano workshop for teenagers and writes in the mornings at a kitchen table with a view of the river.

 

You can listen to piano sketches of her albums on the music pages.