Sheila Jordan & Melanie Bong

"On stage she is the best there ever was," said someone who really knew: Karl H. Miklin. During her time as a professor at the KUG in Graz, we experienced Sheila in her unique and often very spiritual way of opening the ears of her students and showing them ways to sing from the depths of the heart.

One of the students who was profoundly influenced by Sheila is Melanie Bong. Her first encounter with Sheila Jordan took place in the late 80s and was one of the events that influenced the rest of Melanie's life. She remembers: "The night before I met Sheila for the first time, I had a dream about her. I had never met her before and had never seen a picture of Sheila, I didn't even know if she was black or white. In my dream, I saw Sheila at her first audition at the Graz Jazz School. The next day, I went to the audition. When I entered the lecture hall, I saw exactly the woman I had met in my dream the night before! Even the clothes matched."

Perhaps some similarities in their personal biographies played a role in the fact that a familial relationship developed between Sheila Jordan and Melanie quite quickly. This is how Sheila Jordan came to move into Melanie Bong's two-room apartment in her second semester. "I call Sheila my musical mother, because that's exactly what she is to me," Melanie remembers. (Text by Gerhard  Kosel)

Native Voices is a fascinating journey through the lives of the two singers of different generations. And last but not least, it focuses on the similarities and differences between Melanie's Gypsy roots on the one hand and Sheila's Native American origins on the other.