A jazz musician needs a sense of humor…

​​Erica spent her early career as a working musician in NYC performing in Broadway orchestras, touring with big bands and recording on various projects, having experiences that varied from wholesome, educational and elating, to defeating, confusing and downright soul-crushing. After 12 years of beating her head against the career-in-jazz wall she came to a point of utter burnout, not having gained the musical or financial success she delusionally thought was possible as a saxophonist in NYC and up and moved to Montana. Yes, Montana.

In 2018 during the #metoo movement Erica began to reminisce and dive into her memories as the often sole woman on and off the bandstand and realized that one of the many reasons for her burnout was because she was a victim of, as many women are, the patriarchy. She figured she had two choices. Either write an epic rant on Facebook, thus risking looking like a crazy person and burning bridges OR write some music. She decided she’d start with writing some tunes because, what the hell!

But she was a product of an instrumental jazz education at Juilliard, and these songs needed more than just a hip melody and complicated chord progressions. These songs needed actual words. But writing songs with words was not in her wheelhouse. Should she dare bend from the musical traditions and values so deeply ingrained in her creative psyche and actually speak her musical mind? She thought, f***it, and wrote her first funny tune “You’re the Man”, a little ditty about a mansplaining incident where the gentleman underestimated her knowledge of John Coltrane.

After performing the song for a gaggle of her intoxicated friends one night, Erica realized she was funny. Not just friend funny… ACTUALLY funny. Upon this epiphany the beast inside was released! Never to be caged again. Her songwriting snowballed into more hilarious insane numbers such as “You’re Becoming a Woman but Let’s Not Talk About It” and “Another Day, Another Nipple”, a witty waltz about breastfeeding.

Her knack for comedic songwriting then became an obsession, an extension of her creative path, and she now tours with her own one-woman show “BOOBS! with Erica von Kleist”. This 90-minute escapade of estrogen features all her original songs, with Erica on piano and ukulele, singing her jazzy little heart out while making people lose their shit laughing. Seriously folks, it’s really funny. 

So funny that Erica decided to marry her jazz roots with her new comedic prowess to expand on her BOOBS project. Prepare for… “BOOBS! With Erica von Kleist and the ALL MALE JAZZ ENSEMBLE!” Yes, a jazz version of her comedy project, complete with a backing band just dripping with testosterone. The group premiered at Jazz St. Louis back in March 2023, and an EP of the show is coming out in January 2024 with shows announced soon after. This is all assuming the Erica can break into the jazz performance market after only 25 years in the business, but she’s just a rookie so her expectations are in check. 

Wanna keep reading? There’s more! Erica thought that it wasn’t enough to have a comedy show. She also wrote a musical entitled “Sorry” that debuted at Alpine Theatre Project in October 2021. Her ultimate goal is to erect this show on some sort of a stage on or around the Broadway or Off Broadway vicinity by the time she’s 50. Write to Erica directly if you want to know more about this project, especially if you have lots of money and want to produce it because it’s that good.

Had enough? Pshhh. Of course not. The plot thickens…

This new talent and obsession of hers quickly became the talk of the small town of Whitefish, MT where she was still living at the time. She began to team up with several writers and editors on collaborative projects, including co-penning the hit(?) musical comedy film Your Musical Is Cancelled. The Musical! with David Blair, Mikey Winn and Adam Pitman. Featuring an almost all-Broadway cast and orchestra (orchestrations by Erica) the film went on to win Best Comedy at the Toronto Alt Film Festival, Best Feature at the SoCal Film Awards, and premiered at the New York Independent Film Festival in June of 2021. It was the little pandemic project that could!

The success of the film was inspiring for our quaint mountain town, and the tourism bureau invited the team to pen an original music video encouraging tourists to not be jerks and please wear a mask. You can watch it here.

Local politician and all around stand-up guy Kyle Waterman also reached out to the crew and hired them to come up with a campaign video highlighting what a great candidate he was for House District 5 in Kalispell, MT. While the video was a hit, he sadly lost to a gentleman named John Fuller, who wants to ban yoga pants. So there’s that. But the video is funny and you should watch it.

So yeah, the comedy thing is the real deal for miss Erica. And yes, she’s a teacher too, which is why you see a whole education portion on this website, so click if you want to learn more about that. She’s written a book and has a web series and stuff so you totally should. 

But if not, hire Erica’s one-woman show for something. A cabaret space, theatre, theater, house concert or dare I say…a jazz club. At the very least, follow her on social media to keep up on her latest antics.