Here’s Listening to You, Kid
An unknown jazz pianist got a lucky break and won the singing role of a lifetime in “La La Land.”
In late September 2012, Angela Parrish loaded her aging Honda Fit, affectionately known as Tessa, with all her earthly possessions. Embarking from her hometown of Newton, Kansas, with a meager amount of funds and a nebulous dream, the raven-haired jazz pianist and singer set out for Los Angeles.
“I had a bag of bread and a jar of peanut butter, $700 and, I guess, grit,” says Parrish, who was 26 at the time. “I knew if I didn’t leave home then, I never would.”
A little more than four years later, Parrish’s voice is the first one you hear in, the aspirational musical for Hollywood dreamers that swept all seven categories for which it was nominated at
