Riding a bus to an arts academy in the middle of Hartford city during high school proved to be one of the most rewarding experiences for Richard Saunders’s development as a musician. “Students there were showing me what’s so great about artists like Lauryn Hill, Donny Hathaway, and a Tribe Called Quest. There was something in urban music that I really clung to. I realized how cordial and insincere some of the music I listened to growing up was, whereas soul music is blunt, says things like it is.” At 17, Richard gathered his friends from his hometown and Hartford to record a set of six songs that would be released under the title Urban Appeal EP. Velvety vocals mixed with astonishingly prodigious instrumentalists to create a sound unlike any other—as if a young Michael Buble spent his high school years living in Harlem.

Upon the completion of Urban Appeal EP, Richard went on to conquer just about every jazz vocal award that exists for humans of his age. Upon his senior year, Richard was the first-ever vocalist selected to sing with the Next Generation Jazz Orchestra and participated for the second time in the Gibson/Baldwin GRAMMY Jazz Ensembles. In the same year, he won silver in the jazz voice category at the NFAA youngARTS week, and is one of twenty high school students that the US Department of Education selected to be a Presidental Scholar in the Arts. These and other opportunities have allowed him to perform with band mates Jake Goldbas, Owen Broder, and Shenel Johns at such prestigious venues as the Kennedy Center, North Sea, and Monterey Jazz Festivals.

Having mastered the fine art of scatting, he has decided to push all of that aside and perform the music that is truest to himself—his own. His no-nonsense approach to songwriting allows him to succinctly speak his mind about the isolation and weirdness of growing up in the suburbs. No doubt, his Berklee Songwriting Contest and Young Guns National Battle of the Bands award-winning Octet will have much to say as it plays its soulful music through the streets of Boston.