Born in Newark, New Jersey, she draws from the blues and jazz tradition inspired by her father, Horace Luke Wooten — blues singer, harmonicist, and self-taught pianist — who taught her to take her blues interpretations down to the cotton fields of the South.
Pucci is an original. She walks onstage and reshapes the standards from the inside; they become whatever she needs them to be that night. Sometimes tender, sometimes wicked, always swinging, the audience belongs to her within minutes. She mesmerizes the room, selling out venues from Birdland to Mezzrow to Bangkok to Russia.
She has led her quartet for twenty years. Her debut album, Sweet Dreams, was recorded with Kenny Barron. As a bandleader she changes things up on the stand in a heartbeat, keeping her musicians on their toes and the night unpredictable. She gives the band the freedom to groove to the intensity of the songs, and when the rhythm section throws her a curve, she catches it, bends it, sends it back swinging. Up-tempo burner or intimate ballad, she takes it somewhere the chart didn’t promise.
A graduate of the New School with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Classical and Contemporary Music, she is also a SAG-AFTRA and Actors’ Equity member, a visual artist, and an educator committed to mentoring the next generation.
