Last August, budding belle Kristina Morales and her band, the Bayou Shufflers, took to Kickstarter to score funding for its album, Louisiana Fairytale. A departure from the contemporary jazz stylings found on Morales’ solo debut, Wonderful World (2012), the recently released Louisiana Fairytale travels through the realms of contemporary jazz, from its Fats Waller-penned title track to the sounds of Frenchmen Street today. Classically trained, Morales, a graduate of the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (NOCCA), would pursue musical theatre the Boston Conservatory, but upon return to the Crescent City, opportunities to sing on stage were limited outside of the bandstand. With only a small amount of experience in jazz and little to none fronting a band apart from the curiosity that convinced her to hop on stage and give it a shot, Morales’ maturation as a vocalist and an artist has occurred largely in front of an audience — taking cues from the musicians around her and drawing from an innate sense of rhythm and phrasing she attributes to simply growing up in the French Quarter. “There’s something so special about being in the moment and learning a live art the way it was meant to be learned,” she says.

To find out just what goes into that special moment, tune in below…