LA-BASED NORWEGIAN DIVA ROCKS EUROPE

NORWEGIAN VENUS: Norwegian singer Caroline Waters, who is based in Los Angeles, has received a lot of attention for her latest album, “Venus Envy.”

CROSS-CONTINENTAL PERFORMER
Caroline Waters comes from Norway, but is known all over the world. She belts out a note and audiences scream for more. The Norwegian songstress resides in Los Angeles and has recently launched a tour across Europe, but the hype surrounding Waters doesn’t affect her.

Caroline Waters, this “amazon with flaming red hair and a four-octave range,” is known in two continents as a Norwegian diva.

She belts out her jazz songs and describes her performance style as “funky eclectic pop with a jazz flourish, sensual grooves, dreamy melodies and deeply empowering lyrics.”

But she can also bring Norwegians back to their childhood homeland. Singing at the Norwegian Seamen’s Church in San Pedro on Syttende Mai, not wearing a trace of make-up, she drifts into a children’s song she remembers. Tears come to her eyes as she hushes the audience with the purity of her delivery.

SHE HAS SURPRISED audiences with other Norwegian recollections as well. At the Scandinavian Film Festival in Beverly Hills, playing with her band for the closing reception, she stuns the audience with a plaintive, piercing rendition of a traditional Norwegian cattle call.

Still, it is her funky rhythm and blues, her smooth jazz and her dreamy ballads that are bringing her international attention lately.

She is well known in her native Norway, where she grew up in an entertainment family as the daughter of a popular Norwegian singer and a childhood star herself in Norwegian film and television. Today it is her music she is known for.

A recent review in Kvinner og Klær, a fashion magazine in Norway, describes a show she did in a venue named Smuget: “We’re in a popular nightclub in Oslo. An amazon in a miniskirt and flaming red hair enters the stage, hits a note on the guitar, and sings. The tones rise and fall. Her voice comes from deep within her core and soul, first with intense joy, next in dark melancholia. The audience applauds and screams: MORE! Caroline tears off her jacket, lifts her arms over her head, kicks the beat with the most solid boots ever seen at Smuget and roars: ‘I wanna live, I wanna live right, I wanna love, I wanna love right, I wanna do what is right for me.”