Richard Cortez’s timeless, golden baritone voice handles The Great American Songbook with a deep emotional intelligence, an unbridled passion for song, and an activist’s relationship to both his material and his audience.

His debut jazz album Mood Swings (la reserve) hit 1 million streams just three months after its release and has now passed 2 million. With Amazon Music listing his recording of “You Don’t Know What Love Is” as one of the top jazz recordings of 2024, Richard Cortez has quickly become a leader in the new crop of vocal talents emerging from the contemporary straight ahead jazz scene.

Known for his ambition and extensive knowledge of The Great American Songbook, Richard Cortez has shared the bandstand with some of the world’s most celebrated and respected jazz musicians: Sullivan Fortner, Peter Bernstein, Orange Julius, Kyle Poole, Yasushi Nakamura, Paul Sikivie, Adam Birnbaum, Paul Gill, Grant Stewart, Alexander Claffy, Joe Farnsworth, Jerry Weldon, Joe Strasser, Nicole Glover, Russell Hall, and Emmet Cohen, to name a few.

In 2024, Richard released a holiday album, A Cavlan and Cortez Christmas, with viral TikTok vocalist and labelmate June Cavlan whose millions of views on the popular platform generated quite a buzz around the pair’s duo project this holiday season.

Richard is currently on tour internationally promoting the two albums he released in 2025 – Nightbird and Standards in Orbit. The tour spans from singing with an orchestra in Oslo performing the works of Nat King Cole to playing celebrated jazz venues across America and Canada like Cafe Vivace (Cincinnati), The Black Cat (San Francisco), Yardbird Suite (Edmonton, Alberta), Libretto (Paso Robles) and The Catalina Club (Los Angeles) where he headlined his own show as well as opened for 96-year-old jazz legend Marilyn Maye.

Richard also recently partnered with luxury men’s clothing brand Todd Snyder, where he performed in-store at Rockefeller Center and his songs currently play in all their stores nationwide.
When not on the road, Richard splits his time between a number of monthly residencies at iconic venues across the city—among them Birdland and Mezzrow, sister venue of Smalls. At these residencies, Cortez has focused and refined his artistry while growing his wide fan-base. Recent performances in distinguished productions such as Live at Emmet’s Place with the Emmet Cohen Trio, or Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jazz at Pride with Tony/Grammy Award winner Bryan Carter, have marked the vocalist’s career for success.

Richard Cortez’s renderings of timeless compositions written between 1928-1960 by composers like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin and so many others deliver sweetness, self-assuredness and disarming vulnerability with a well-timed wit. Richard breathes exciting new life into this beloved material, forever reminding us that as we progress as a society, so do our stories told within these sacred songs.