“It’s certainly not something that occurred  to us when we were thinking about starting a band in 1988,” says Darmon Meader, musical director and tenor singer of New York Voices, about the seminal vocal ensemble’s 30th anniversary. “But the band has a momentum of its own—it has a life now.” Indeed, that momentum and life force has a firm grip on Meader and his bandmates, baritone Peter Eldridge and dual sopranos Lauren Kinhan and Kim Nazarian. Each has a separate and busy career of his or her own, working as a soloist and educator in the jazz vocal world, but each makes New York Voices their top priority.

“We’re like a four-headed old married couple—we’re just a big family at this point,” Meader says.

New York Voices was born in the mid-1980s at upstate New York’s Ithaca College. Peter Eldridge, an aspiring jazz pianist who came late to singing; Kim Nazarian, who dreamed of a life on Broadway; and Darmon Meader, a saxophonist and self-described “choral geek,” came together in the school’s vocal jazz ensemble. Director Dave Reilly included all three of them, as well as Caprice Fox, in an ensemble he’d been invited to bring on a tour of European jazz festivals. “It seemed to go over so well that Darmon and I decided to keep it going, try to make something happen professionally,” Eldridge recalls. “Kim and Caprice were part of that original band, and we slowly but surely made the transition to New York City in 1988.” There they met Sara Krieger, who became the fifth member of the band Reilly had named “New York Voices.”

One of their debut performance’s as a quintet was at Preacher’s, a club in Greenwich Village, which launched the beginning of a sizable following and noise enough to start attracting the interest of record labels. They signed with GRP in 1989 and quickly made their first recording, New York Voices, a mix of acoustic and electric, traditional and crossover jazz. They then hit the road, touring America in a motor home and making their first international excursions as they worked to build a worldwide audience.

With the dawn of the 21st century, NYV increased its currency in the jazz world via collaborations with institutions such as the Count Basie Orchestra, Paquito d’Rivera, and the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band. They also launched a jazz education initiative, inaugurating its Vocal Jazz Camp for aspiring jazz singers in 2008. (A European version of the Camp began in 2016). Each of its members has also established a career as an educator: Eldridge is a voice professor at Berklee College of Music; Nazarian is vocal jazz instructor at Ithaca College and artist-in-residence at both Bowling Green State University and Tri-C Community College in Cleveland; Kinhan is an adjunct faculty member at New York University; and Meader is an artist in residence at Indiana University.

The geographical distance that these jobs require, along with each member’s active solo pursuits, is partly responsible for the long gap between New York Voices albums. Yet Reminiscing in Tempo finds both their individual chops and their collective chemistry to be as powerful as ever—and kicks off what NYV hopes will be another long stretch of work together. “The things that I’m really proud of are our longevity, which just surprises and shocks all of us; the fact that our music has grown and gotten better; and the fact that we all still want to make music together,” says Nazarian. “We’re not done yet. We all have a little something more to say together.”