Ayça Miraç was born in Gelsenkirchen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. She grew up bilingual in a multicultural surrounding.
Her father, Turkish author and poet Yaşar Miraç, played an important role in her early musical development, especially by playing extended improvisations on the piano everyday. Unsurprisingly, she followed his example and developed her own singing language, before she even knew how to speak.
At the age of 4 she joined a children’s choir and had her first stage performances. A little later she started playing the piano and went to a ballet school. As a teenager she participated in various opera productions as a choir singer and was chosen to be part of a singing workshop series in her hometown and began performing as a soloist.
In 2007, after secondary school she moved to the Netherlands to study vocal jazz at ArtEZ Conservatory. Right in the beginning she founded her first jazz quartet and did many concerts in Northern Europe and toured through Turkey (among them: Istanbul, Izmir, Antalya).
At that time she also started to work with bassist and arranger Philipp Grußendorf who should become her accompanist and partner both in musical and private life.
After graduation Ayça moved back to Germany and started to collaborate with musicians from Cologne. Currently she is studying at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen and performs mainly with her quartet around Europe and Turkey.
To Ayça it is very important to create music that is very personal and honest. To accomplish this she is constantly looking for ways to combine all of her cultural roots to create her natural, unique style. Fortunately her family bought a second residence at the Bosphorus in Istanbul where Ayça spent most of her summer holidays which enabled her to maintain a deep connection to country, language and culture of her parents that’s crucial to her music.
Apart from that it’s her heartfelt wish to preserve the dying culture of her ancestors on the maternal side, the Laz people, a caucasian minority that has been oppressed in Turkey for a long time (the history of the Laz dates back to ancient times and their language has been classified as a “critically endangered language” by the UNESCO).
In autumn of 2013 a long-cherished dream came true, when Ayça got the chance to meet one of her biggest heroes: Wayne Shorter. In a deep conversation he encouraged her to continue her way and to keep creating the music she herself feels most dedicated to.
