Jaimina Johnston

Singer, composer and pianist born in Liverpool. Her parents belonged to the world of choral classical music, so she studied music since childhood. As her mother was Spanish and her father was British, she grew up completely bilingual. At 16 years old, she met the incipient rock scene, left the choir where she sang as a soprano soloist and began to perform in small concert halls and pubs in hometown Liverpool, including mythic The Cavern. Her repertoire has a very wide range: pop, rock, soul, Latin music, jazz, blues, musical comedy, classical music. Her style is based in making accapella covers of well known songs, stripping them out, extracting their very quintessence to finally present them in a new and surprising fashion. Her voice has an amazing range of soprano quality, and distinctive sound. Her musical career had a twist in 1967 when she wed a Porto Rican businessman and settled in San Juan (Puerto Rico). There she followed performing in jazz clubs with great success. In 1969 she met a male choral accapella trio who was touring Puerto Rico. They were the 3Tones and they became from then on, with their voicing and complex harmonies, the perfect complement for Jaimina’s voice. Jaimina Johnston’s sound was definitely born. The fame of the singer extended, first in Puerto Rico, where she is a real diva, and then trough all Latin America. The list of artists covered by Mrs Johnston is enormous, and she has sung in a lot of languages including of course Spanish and English, but also French, German, Italian, Russian, Basque, Japanese, Latin, etc. For many years, her musical activity has been focused to live performing and there are no recordings from most part of their career. In 1979 she performed in Los Angeles, California, where she met Quincy Jones, who invited her to record an LP with her best songs, attempting to introduce her in the USA market, but Jaimina Johnston retracted in the last moment, and she began instead a very long tour of concerts all over the world, including Philippines, Cape City, Sydney, Tokyo, Berlin and finally Madrid, with huge success. At the end of the eighties, her appearances spare, due to the illness of her husband, who finally died in 1989. Jaimina Johnston returned to Europe and settled down in hometown Liverpool, where she performed, 20 years later, in The Cavern,” The circle is closed” she declared. News from the singer lack during the 90s. In 2004, she is back to news when the British Justice sends her to prison because of tax evasion. In spite of protests from her fans and international pressure, she stayed one year and a half in jail. After that, and maybe due to financial breakdown, she returned to the scene, singing with great success to a brand new generation of fans. Exhausted after a long tour she even had to go twice through vocal cord surgery. Nevertheless, she kept on singing, and finally she accepted recording her first album (after a 4-decade-career): “So Many Songs” was published in May 2007, and it became quickly a cult classic. Back-to-back album “So Little Time” was edited right after and it resulted even more successful. In March 2008, “Test of Time” is published, closing the so called “Trilogy of Time”. Nowadays Jaimina Johnston is planning to perform live again and maybe recording a live album. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.