Leslie Vincent at Twin Cities Jazz Fest Show (June 19, 2026)

Twin Cities Jazz Festival
June 19 @ 6:30 pm – 11:00 pm

MetroNOME Brewery is proud to once again be a featured venue for the Twin Cities Jazz Festival.

Little Black Book is the forthcoming third album — and first of all original songs — by Minneapolis jazz vocalist and songwriter Leslie Vincent, to be released independently on April 17 via the indie label, Jazz Is Cool, on CD and audiophile vinyl formats as well as all streaming services. Vincent wrote these dozen songs across several years, placing songwriting at the center of her work as a jazz vocalist for the first time.

The album was written and recorded with Vincent’s longtime working band — pianist/keyboardist Patrick Adkins, guitarist Blake Foster, bassist Matt McIntyre, drummer Ben Ehrlich, and trumpeter Mitch Van Laar — musicians she has worked with consistently through rehearsal, touring, and performance. Guest contributors include songwriter and vocalist Jeremy Messersmith, tenor saxophonist Stephanie Wieseler, trombonist Zach Marley, and violinist Mary Alice Hutton, with horn arrangements by Sam Charlton.

Vincent’s move toward original songwriting has unfolded gradually across her discography. Her debut, These Foolish Things (2020), established her as an interpreter grounded in the jazz tradition. With About Last Night (2023), she leaned more decisively into songs drawn from lived experience, earning recognition from DownBeat, which described her as “as much a storyteller as she is a jazz singer,” and from Minneapolis’ Jazz88 FM, which named the original song “Icetown Blues” one of the Best Jazz Songs of 2025.

“I’m proud to live in Minneapolis, but I don’t feel contained by it,” Vincent says. “I look forward to sharing Little Black Book with the jazz world writ large, and help elevate my city’s cultural fabric in the process.”

“Leslie is a terrific songwriter — it’s so refreshing to hear an album of original, jazz music that feels both familiar and unique,” says two-time Grammy-winning vocalist and composer Nicole Zuraitis. “Her lyrics tell stories that paint vivid pictures all wild, the band swings. The album showcases her talent, all of it radiating from her pen.”

Little Black Book follows directly in that trajectory, presenting songwriting not as a departure from jazz tradition, but as a natural extension of Vincent’s artistic voice within it.“Once I started writing originals, I realized how much I loved it,” Vincent says. “I put a lot of time and attention into the process. I especially love watching audiences respond in real time to words I’ve strung together, ideas I’ve carried for a long time. It’s incredibly rewarding.”

The songs that make up Little Black Book were originally imagined as a one-woman show. Many began as lines or scenes Vincent jotted down — voice memos captured while walking her dog or driving — accumulating gradually until they gelled into one record. The result is a song cycle rooted in lived experience: dating, distraction, anxiety, memory, and the grounding presence of long-term partnership.

While Vincent brings material into the room, her band shapes them collectively. “I’ll write some bones — a skeleton — and put things on paper,” she explains. “Then when we have the full band, we’ll spend quite a long time obsessing about it. It’s amazing how long we could talk about one chord change.” That attention to detail — deciding when to honor tradition and when to play with it — reflects a jazz process applied to original material. “It’s always done out of love for the art form,” Vincent says.

The album opens with “Analog Love Affair,” written from Vincent’s exhaustion with constant digital interruption. “Honestly, if I could go back to the ’90s and live in the analog world, I would,” she says. The lyric states the tension plainly: “My emails take up all of my mind / But I’d rather be with you,” before asking for “an analog love affair / Where no one gets to intrude.”

“Tallying Strangers” grew out of a conversation with a close friend who had just gone on her hundredth first date. Vincent imagined the repetition of introductions and eye contact — the quiet math of modern dating — shaping the song around a question that never quite resolves: “How many strangers’ eyes / Do I have to meet / Until you finally / Make your way to me?”

“What Humans Do,” co-written with jeremy messersmith, came from a practice Vincent calls “Human Days” — intentional breaks meant to reconnect with physical experience. The lyric lists what she wanted instead of routine: calling in sick, putting her fingers in the dirt, climbing trees, taking her phone off the hook.

“Love on Cape Cod” draws from Vincent’s relationship to storytelling across time. Loosely inspired by Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet, it reflects on earlier lives and intimacies — what love looked like, and what was possible, in another era — while subtly echoing Vincent’s own.

“Ex #4: The Comedian” came out of a relationship that continued to surface long after it ended. “I dated a comedian who didn’t treat me right,” Vincent says. “The way he treated me still haunts me. I’m ready for those thoughts and hang-ups to let me go. This song was my attempt to do that.”

Vincent has now found true love with her wife — and with “You & I (Go Together Like),” Vincent turns toward her marriage today. Guitarist Blake Foster wrote the music, and Vincent shaped the lyrics around specific images — a honeymoon by the sea, nights by a backyard fire pit. Foster also wrote the music for “Swinging Tattooed Queen,” which Vincent wrote after her wife got a large, radiant new tattoo. “I just thought it was so beautiful,” Vincent says. “The words poured out: ‘Blues, yellows, greens / Oh, your body is a kaleidoscope scene.’”

“Rainy Days” grew from Vincent’s experience with anxiety. “I’m an anxious person — I can get caught up in my emotions,” she says. Rather than hiding that from her partner, the song holds it in place. “But you say you love my rainy days.” Vincent adds, “I’m fascinated by this idea that once you find love, your baggage doesn’t disappear. You just need someone who loves your baggage.”

“Harriet the Spy” circles questions of truth-telling and restraint, shaped in part by Vincent’s experience moving from the East Coast to the Midwest. The lyric lands on what gets softened or withheld: “The world doesn’t have the room for all our truth.”

“Till They Do” came from a relationship that ended through ghosting after nine months. “While it was heartbreaking at the time,” Vincent says, “what a story for a song.” The line doesn’t blink: “You don’t know how they’re gonna leave you till they do.”

The album closes with two of Vincent’s earliest and funniest songs. “Hannah Always Cries at IKEA,” one of the first songs she ever wrote and a longtime favorite at her live shows, follows a real friend overwhelmed while preparing to move in with her partner. “Girls at My School” looks back on Vincent leaving her Maryland hometown at eighteen and rarely returning, taking inventory of what stayed the same — the house on the hill, the chain-link fence removed — and what didn’t: “But they don’t remember a thing / About all the ways that we dreamed.”

“I live by the belief that if I feel something, other people have felt it too,” Vincent says. “By being vulnerable onstage, I can help someone else feel seen — to realize, ‘I didn’t know anyone else felt that way. I’d never thought about it like that.’”

Little Black Book arrives April 17th on all streaming platforms, CDs and vinyl.

Track List

1.Analog Love Affair

2.Tallying Strangers

3.What Humans Do (co-written with Jeremy Messersmith)

4.Love on Cape Cod

5.Ex #4: The Comedian

6.You & I (Go Together Like)

7.Swinging Tattooed Queen

8.Rainy Days

9.Harriet the Spy

10.Till They Do

11.Hannah Always Cries at IKEA

12.Girls at My School