Vaughnette Bigford is a vocalist, entertainment entrepreneur, band leader, and new host of the revamped, iconic, youth talent show, 12 and Under. she has been featured at every major jazz event in Trinidad and at the Tobago Jazz Experience, Barbados Jazz Excursion and the Berklee Summer Concert Series among others.
Vaughnette studied for a short period at Boston's Berklee School of Music; she has trained with US based artistes Armstead Christian, Dominique Eade, Donna McElroy, and Trinidad & Tobago's own Jessel Murray.
A dynamic and versatile vocal talent and stage performer, Vaughnette has also worked alongside Ron Reid, Frankie McIntosh, Raf Robertson, Elan Trotman, Carlton Zanda, Boogsie Sharpe, and Ray Holman to name a few.
Born in La Brea in 1974, a child of independence and oil boom, Vaughnette Bigford has announced and established herself as a musical force in the Antillean jazz world, and Trinidad & Tobago in particular.
Described as “...the Creole chanteuse who has made the local songbook the new jazz standard in the Caribbean...”, Vaughnette Bigford marries a simple, clear, ringing, vocal with an insistence that is Afro-Trinidadian; and has crafted a style that means to cut its own path through the musical/cultural undergrowth of the diaspora - most notably by designing and producing her own concerts, which showcase the Vaughnette Bigford Band, and several other luminary local performers.
It is of significant note that having spent much of her adult working life in the oil industry, and having to pivot away from traditional employment in that sector; that one of the cultural aesthetes of Bigford's concert experiences, is the showcase of local small business entrepreneurs – a practice which underscores the fight & survive parallels between herself as an Afro-Antillean descendant, and the Afro-American culture which birthed and innovated jazz.
In the years since her full-time attention to music, Bigford has produced several critically acclaimed concerts, including The Carnival Jazz Brunch, the Sunset Pan Jazz lime, MASKERADE, and HISteria. Always an enhancement of the national, social discourse, her concerts continue to evolve the participants' imagination not only concerning music and what it means to be entertained by it, but about what it means to be and appear Trinidadian, Black, and one's own self, at once.
Vaughnette Bigford still lives in La Brea, and is the mother of Isaiah Miles.
