Julie's performances are always fresh and alive, but they're rooted in a full life brimming with experiences. The daughter of a Sicilian meat cutter and a cool blonde Norwegian beauty, Julie grew up in Seattle's multi-ethnic Ballard neighborhood and attended Western Washington University.
" There was music playing constantly in our home. My parents loved all the great singers on their stereo — Frank Sinatra, Jerry Vale, Dinah Washington, Mel Torme as well as Tom Jones. It was bombarded into my psyche. I didn't have any choice and I loved it."
She originally intended to have a career as a teacher, but the call of the stage proved too strong.
" I was on holiday [in the Caribbean] and a French father and son heard me singing with the hotel band and said I should come to Paris. So I did." She stayed for four years. Among her venues were the town's most fashionable and chic clubs: Le Palace; Les Tires Bouchones; the Hollywood Savoy; Hotel LaFayette, the Hotel George; Plaza Athenee, and a cozy piano bar amid the lacy iron girders of the Eiffel Tower.
In 1989 she returned to Seattle, the "home port" from which she's since traveled the world. She's performed in Istanbul, Rio de Janiero, Istanbul, Bangkok, Hong Kong, London, Hamburg, Sicily, Brussels, New York, Los Angeles (at the Palomino Club and Café Largo), San Francisco, Ketchikan, the Canary Islands, on board international cruise ships and Norway, where she was a contestant on a reality show, Alt For Norge. While she was in New York, choreographer Mark Morris created a dance piece, Mythologies, around Julie's singing.
Whenever she was back home, she starred in "The Julie Cascioppo Experience," a weekly musical cabaret revue at the Pink Door restaurant in Seattle's historic Pike Place Market. She describes the show as a series of "mini one-woman operas," performed in the guises of some 20 different deadpan comic characters. "All the characters sang, as if everybody always sang.… At one time being shy, I used to hide behind the characterizations because I didn't think I was that good of a singer. I like to be funny. and help people forget their problems." Julie's characters were loved by thousands at the Pink Door and other venues, and on regular broadcast and cable TV appearances.
In 2002 she reinvented herself as a more integrated solo artist. "All the creativity I used to put into my characters, I now focus on being ‘me’, and the music."
Today, Julie's performances still offer a lot of fun. But the lightness is just part of a full range of moods, from the sweet and sultry to the tart and saucy, to the incredibly heart wrenching and pensive. It's all part of one personality, one incredible performer.