Singer-songwriter and pianist Laila Biali was nominated for her first Grammy this year.DUANE COLE/The Globe and Mail
Pop goes the jazzer.
Among this year’s more than a dozen Canadian Grammy Award nominees, Laila Biali is easily the unlikeliest.
On the morning of Nov. 7, 2025, the Toronto singer-pianist and her producer husband, Ben Wittman, weren’t even sure they could be bothered to watch the Grammy nomination announcement streaming from Los Angeles. Yes, her album, Wintersongs, was in the running, but the chances of a nomination?
“Not good,” Biali tells The Globe and Mail. “Ben had a yoga class to attend. He had one foot out the door as we waited for the announcement.”
The reason for their pessimism was that the album had been reclassified by the Recording Academy from the alternative jazz category to best traditional pop vocal album. This is an award previously won by such mainstream artists as Paul McCartney, Michael Bublé, Tony Bennett (14 times), Barbra Streisand and Rod Stewart.
Biali plays the piano in her East York home last week. The Vancouver-born artist has been a jazz pianist since her late teens.DUANE COLE/The Globe and Mail
The “traditional” refers to the composition, vocal styling and instrumental arrangement of the body of music known as the Great American Songbook, or music in that stylistic neighbourhood.
Yet Biali is known as a jazz musician. As the host of CBC Radio’s Saturday Night Jazz with Laila Biali, her name is literally associated with the genre.
“My people are jazz people,” says the 45-year-old, sitting at the same kitchen table in the East York bungalow where she watched the nomination announcement.
For whatever reason, the traditional pop finalists weren’t mentioned in the stream she and her husband watched. “We wondered if there were different feeds,” Biali says. “We weren’t sure what was happening.”
Then she began receiving congratulatory texts. “OMG, Laila!” the first message read.
OMG, Laila − exactly. The Vancouver-born former prodigy had not only been nominated for her first Grammy, she was in the running alongside luminaries such as Jennifer Hudson and the duo of Elton John and Brandi Carlile, plus previous winners Streisand, Laufey and Lady Gaga.
“I went into fits,” Laila recalls. “I yelped and started crying and shaking.”
Contenders for a major award will often say it’s an honour to be nominated. In Biali’s case, it rings true. The nomination is the best thing that has ever happened to her, award-wise, even though her chances of winning are slim.
Biali wrote the album Wintersongs in 2021 in the Banff Centre’s Davidson Studio in Alberta.DUANE COLE/The Globe and Mail
The sentimental favourites this year are Hudson (whose The Gift of Love is the Dreamgirls star’s first album in a decade) and Streisand (who hasn’t won a Grammy since 1987, not counting career achievement honours). Lady Gaga and Laufey are heavyweights who have won the traditional pop trophy previously. John and Carlile are nominated for their lauded album Who Believes in Angels?
The irony of Wintersongs being reclassified from jazz to pop is that a loss in the latter field could be better for Biali than a win in the former.
“I think moving to traditional pop is a good move,” says jazz pianist and broadcaster Bill King. “The fact that she’s surrounded by Elton John, Lady Gaga and Barbra Streisand draws attention to the one artist unknown to most. It asks why. Why is this person surrounded by the greats? And it also says that voters believe she belongs.”
New York-based jazz bassist and bandleader Brandi Disterheft, who attended Vancouver’s Handsworth Secondary School with Biali, agrees. “If the Grammy committee recategorized Laila’s submission from jazz into traditional pop, they obviously saw the potential for this artist to break through.”
Biali has been a jazz pianist since her late teens. An athletically gifted class valedictorian who used to read encyclopedias in high school as a hobby, she planned on a career as a concert pianist until her right arm was damaged in a car accident.
She studied jazz at Toronto’s Humber Polytechnic and began singing almost by accident when the owner of a bar she performed at told her piano wasn’t enough and she needed to hire a singer to accompany her.
“I didn’t want to split my fee,” she says. “So, I started to sing and noticed that people were responding.”
Since then, she has self-described her genre-blurring music as being in the “spirit of jazz.” She has been nominated for six Juno Awards (winning one), all in the vocal jazz category. Her 2014 album House of Many Rooms was put forward in Juno’s adult contemporary category but did not receive a nomination.
Biali's singing career began almost by accident, when the owner of a bar she performed at told her piano wasn’t enough.DUANE COLE/The Globe and Mail
Recategorization by the Recording Academy is typically done behind the scenes with little fuss, but there have been exceptions. In 2020, on the day he received three pop (and one country) nominations, Justin Bieber complained on Instagram about his Changes album not being nominated in R&B.
“I grew up admiring R&B music and wished to make a project that would embody that sound,” he wrote. “For this not to be put into that category feels weird considering from the chords to the melodies to the vocal style, all the way down to the hip-hop drums that were chosen, it is undeniably, unmistakably an R&B album!”
(Bieber did not win in pop for Changes. This year he’s up for trophies in both pop and R&B, as well as album of the year for Swag.)
A pop nomination for a jazz artist can be a double-edged sword, says four-time Grammy winner Jane Bunnett, who played flute and soprano saxophone on Wintersongs.
“It’s better if your future dream is being a pop star. But for jazz credibility, in my opinion, it’s a short-lived buzz.”
Biali wrote the string-laden Wintersongs in 2021 in the Banff Centre’s Davidson Studio, a star-shaped, mountain-set cabin named after its architect, Ian Davidson. On the jazziest track, Rocky Mountain Lullaby, Biali sings a description: “A cozy wooden cottage house sits atop of the hill, covered in snow.”
It wasn’t intended to be a cold weather album, but the first song she wrote on the studio’s Steinway baby grand was Drifting Down Ice. “I immediately went with my muse, and the muse said, ‘You’re going to write winter music,’” she recalls.
Biali and Wittman had intended to use a string quartet, but later expanded it to include a chamber orchestra. Rob Mathes, who has worked with everyone from Avril Lavigne to Lenny Kravitz, did the arranging and conducting.
Whether Wintersongs has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning on Sunday is probably irrelevant.
“Any acknowledgment at the Grammys is a gift,” Mathes says. “The winners are often those with name recognition. The nominations are the key.”
Wittman is likewise looking at the bigger picture.
“Her music is largely song-based, so this a fantastic opportunity to introduce her to the larger pop-song-oriented audience.”
This year’s Grammy Awards will take place Feb. 1 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. Typically, the traditional pop award is presented during the pretelecast ceremony on Sunday afternoon. But with such high-powered names involved this year, the category might go prime time.
“We’ll see,” says Biali, who will attend the main ceremony with Wittman and their son. “You never know.”
You really don’t. She’s proof of that.