Valerie Sajdik: Singing, Lyrics and Music, Host  

Valerie Sajdik was born on April 2nd in the wine-making region close to Vienna, Austria. Due to her parents´ profession, Valerie had a peripatetic childhood in Moscow, where she attended French School. Valerie speaks (and sings!), German, French and English fluently and has a working knowledge of Russian.

Aged 14, Valerie made her stage debut with her first release. A year later, Valerie interned for a classical singer, Barbara Skipworth, in Pennsylvania , accompanying her to New York as a page turner for Kurt Weill recitals. Valerie developed a love for live performance and received her first singing lessons...

Valerie’s travels continued to New York, where she discovered the Jazz scene and shortly after was inspired to study jazzsinging at the Vienna Konservatorium.   .

Soon after, Valerie started playing gigs in the jazz cellars in Vienna with her electro-jazz band, Valeriesgarden“ Simultaneously, she began some experimentation work with German lyrics and achieved her first chart successes with the girl band, “C-bra” followed by a tour through Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

Valerie also gathered experience as a stage actress and singer, appearing in the play „Das Dorf an der Grenze“, (The Village at the Boarder) at the city theatre in Klagenfurt.  In the play, she interpreted songs by the band „Naked Lunch“. As well as pursuing her acting and musical career, Valerie also continued her law studies which she started in Vienna and then finished at the  Université René Descartes Paris in 2002.

Valerie immersed herself in the Parisian music scene and one of her music projects brought her to the little village of ‘Saint Privat’ in the deep South.  There, she built up a music studio with C-bra producer David Bronner, to  develop the first songs for her solo career. The village of Saint Privat, surrounded by vineyards and olivetrees, turned out to be a place of auspicious creativity, lending its name to a musical collaboration with the Austrian dub and down tempo artist Klaus Waldeck. Two of the „Saint Privat“ band members were former members of “Valeriesgarden”.

After the big surprise success of “Saint Privat” ´s first album „Riviera“ in 2004 with the hit single „Tous les jours“, Valerie went on world tour and together with Klaus Waldeck won „Newcomer of the Year“ at the Amadeus Music Awards. The second album, “Superflu“, (2006), to which Valerie made a sizeable contribution to the lyrics, also experienced commercial and critical success.

In the interim, Valerie penned many more chansons in both French and German in her studio in the South of France. Her endeavours were rewarded by the signing of a solo deal with Sony Austria. The album „Picknick“ is released in 2007 with the hit single „Mädchen“ (for which Valerie received the Amadeus Award for “Song of the Year”), and „Regen“, which stayed in the  Austrian charts for 29 weeks, often in the Top 10.

In Germany, the hit  „Regen“ enjoyed similar success, reaching number 2 in the charts voted by listeners of the Radio NDR. Valerie’s second solo album „Ich bin du bist“ was launched in 2010 and till now is perhaps the most personal of Valerie´s albums, receiving many good reviews. With this album in her ‘back pocket’, Valerie was invited to perform at the Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, at the Midem in Cannes and at a one week Festival of Chinese and Austrian Contemporary Music in Beijing and Shanghai. Following an invitation from musicmanager Willi Türk, Valerie performed in the imperial town of Bad Ischl, in Upper Austria, as a surprise guest with the „A, B, C and D of Boogie Woogie with Jools Holland, British star musician and entertainer, and Rolling Stones Drummer Charlie Watts. Valerie had the privilege of participating at a nation-wide tour with Jools Holland, and in June 2011, they recorded „Wohin die Liebe fällt/Wheel of fortune“, written by Holland as a homage to Edith Piaf  in the Helicon Mountain Studios in London. The song will appear in his upcoming album „Jools Holland and friends“ (released on the 16th of September 2011) alongside songs recorded with Sting, Bono, BB King and German artists like Herbert Grönemeyer, Ina Müller and Roger Cicero. Earlier that year, Valerie was to return to New York City to record some vocals on a jazzproduction of “Pudditorium”.

A biography with facts can be downloaded here.