Avery Sunshine

From a Chester piano bench to a church job in Atlanta

Denise Nicole White was born on 22 May 1975 in Chester, Pennsylvania, and began piano lessons at eight after watching a classmate play. The order of her training — hymns first, then classical repertoire, then jazz from about thirteen — is still audible in the way she moves between a soul chord voicing and a gospel cadence without marking the join.

She left Country Day School of the Sacred Heart in Bryn Mawr in 1993 for Spelman College in Atlanta, enrolled as a piano major and graduated in 1998 with a degree in philosophy instead. While at Spelman she formed DaisyRew, a gospel and R&B duo with the vocalist Maia Nkenge Wilson. The job that followed college was Minister of Music at St Paul AME Church in Atlanta: a weekly post rather than a career plan, and several years of carrying a room with a keyboard and a voice.

The professional name arrived in 2003, assembled out of characters from The Color Purple and Harlem Nights. Atlanta has been the base ever since.

Four albums, one label, no major

The self-titled debut came out in 2010 on BigShine, made with the producer and guitarist Dana Johnson. USA Today called it refreshingly original; The Washington Post described a radiant brand of soul. The SunRoom followed in 2014 and Twenty Sixty Four in 2017. Sunshine and Johnson married on 3 April 2016, and he has remained the guitarist in her band, which makes the records and the live show a single working arrangement rather than two.

So Glad to Know You arrived in 2024 through BigShine Recordings, the label she co-founded to put out independent work. It is not only an album: the project doubles as a musical web series, with episode numbers attached to the track titles — the single Lifted Up is billed as episode one. The venue biography she circulates counts four top-twenty Billboard entries across her catalogue, one of them a number one, and lists touring across Asia, Europe, the UK and Australia.

Alongside the music she sits as a Board Governor of the Atlanta chapter of the Recording Academy, runs the LouMack Beauty cosmetics company, and hosts a podcast, The Hey Sunshine Show.

A Grammy, split down the middle

At the 2025 Grammy Awards, So Glad to Know You won Best Progressive R&B Album — and won it in a dead heat, the trophy shared with NxWorries, the Anderson.Paak and Knxwledge duo, for Why Lawd? The rest of the field was Childish Gambino's Bando Stone & the New World, Kehlani's Crash and Durand Bernarr's En Route. A self-released record on a label she co-owns took a category otherwise filled with major-label albums.

The category moved on quickly. At the 2026 ceremony Best Progressive R&B Album went to Durand Bernarr for Bloom, with FLO, Bilal, Terrace Martin and Kenyon Dixon, and Destin Conrad also nominated. Sunshine was not in that field; no follow-up album has appeared, and her own site still leads with So Glad to Know You.

The 2025–26 diary

The touring pattern since the award has been summer amphitheatres and festivals, winter clubs and theatres. The 2025 run logged the Country Club Hills Amphitheater in Illinois on 28 June, the Dell Music Center in Philadelphia on 10 July, Jacobs Pavilion at Nautica in Cleveland on 23 August, and then a first appearance at Dimitriou's Jazz Alley in Seattle on 11 and 12 November, two nights at 7.30pm with tickets at $45.50 including fees.

Across 2026 she played a Mother's Day show at the Township Auditorium in Columbia, South Carolina on 10 May, Galataport Jazz in Istanbul on 7 June, the Louisville Jazz Fest at the Iroquois Amphitheater on 7 August and the Evans Amphitheater in Cleveland Heights on 9 August.

The current stretch is the busiest part of the year. Waiting to Exhale in Concert takes her to the Durham Performing Arts Center on 5 November and the Fox Theatre in Atlanta on 6 November, with the Jacksonville date on 7 November cancelled. Her own band dates follow at City Winery Nashville on 13 November and the New Orleans Jazz Market on 14 November, then Carnegie Hall on 5 December and a New Year's Eve show at St James LIVE! in Atlanta on 31 December. The published calendar runs well past that: the American Theatre in Hampton on 23 January 2027, the Birchmere in Alexandria on 29 January, Rams Head On Stage in Annapolis on 31 January, two shows at Middle C Jazz in Charlotte on 13 February, Spaghettini in Seal Beach on 15 February, the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Honolulu on 1 August and the Shubert Theatre at Boston's Boch Center on 11 September — fifteen dates on sale in total.

What the band actually does on stage

The touring unit is a quartet and stays one: Sunshine at the piano and singing, Dana "BigDane" Johnson on guitar, Demonterious "Detoxxx" Lawrence on bass and Evan "Young Sir" Menifee on drums. No horns, no backing vocalists, nothing to hide behind. Club bookings start at 7.30pm and run a single set of roughly a dozen songs plus an encore.

Setlist logs put Call My Name, Come Do Nothing, Day Dreaming, I Got Sunshine and Ice Cream Song among the most frequently played pieces, with the title track of the 2024 album now a fixture. Recent sets have made room for covers — Proud Mary, and Maroon 5's Sunday Morning — a straight gospel passage in The Lord Is Blessing Me, and a closing medley that stitches together Get On Up, Kiss and Thank You. Because her husband is the guitarist, a good deal of the between-song talk is domestic rather than promotional.

The November theatre dates are a different format entirely. Waiting to Exhale in Concert, marking the film's thirtieth anniversary, plays the picture on a screen while a full live band under the music director Adam Blackstone performs the soundtrack as the scenes arrive. Sunshine shares the vocal billing with Alexia Jayy and Melanie Fiona, with Jekalyn Carr and The Amours added for the Atlanta night; the programme draws on Whitney Houston, Toni Braxton, Brandy, Mary J. Blige, Chaka Khan, Faith Evans and SWV. Durham has doors at 6.30pm for a 7.30pm start, and the promoter does not recommend it for under-thirteens.