The flyer is a square photograph of a woman in a black sequined jacket against a gray wall, smiling like she knows something you do not. Across the top it says SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2026. Near the bottom is her name, Diamond Franklin, then an ampersand, then The Scott Edmunds Trio featuring John Dimase. Just above her name, in smaller type, is the credential that made me want to write this: Top 5 Finalist, 2025 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition. I am Harry Hayman, and one of the things I love most about SOUTH is getting to introduce new talent to Philadelphia. On Sunday, at 6:00 PM and again at 8:30 PM, our stage belongs to Diamond. I went looking for everything I could verify about her, her teachers and the players beside her, and what I found reads like a map of how this city makes a jazz singer.

Why SOUTH Introduces New Talent

I have spent a lot of years around live music, and one of my favorite things is still watching an audience discover somebody new. You never really know when you are going to catch an artist right before the rest of the world figures out what you have just heard. A room like ours exists for that moment.

SOUTH sits at 600 North Broad Street, and the club’s own site puts the restaurant and the jazz club side by side, with the coming shows listed on the front page. Alisha Miranda, writing for Resy in December 2025, described the jazz club around back as an intimate room with a black piano, an upright bass and a small drum set. In her telling, the show starts with a roaring “Good evening” call and response from the host and ends with a standing ovation. That is the room Diamond Franklin walks into on Sunday.

Not every night at SOUTH is a discovery night, and I would not want it to be. Some are, though. In September, Ruth Naomi Floyd brought Music for the Soul to our stage for two nights, and I wrote about it. Ruth is also one of Diamond’s teachers, which is part of why I started pulling on this thread.

Who Diamond Franklin Is

Diamond is a Philadelphia native. SOUTH’s event page describes her as a classically trained mezzo soprano, actor and songwriter who specializes in jazz, opera, musical theater, R&B and gospel. The finalist bio that WBGO ran in October 2025 adds the details I would put on a résumé first: a Bachelor of Music from Cairn University’s School of Music in 2019, membership in both The Philadelphia Chorale and the Philadelphia Orchestra’s own choir, and performances onstage with Andrea Bocelli and Jon Bon Jovi. It also says she starred as Alice 2 in Opera on Tap Philadelphia’s production of Alice Tierney at the 2025 Philadelphia Fringe Festival.

Three details I could find only on SOUTH’s event page: that she has performed onstage with the R&B singer Estelle, that she was most recently a featured soloist in the Apollo Theater’s talent showcase, and that Denise King is among her teachers. I am telling you which page says what because a credit list is only as good as its source, and you should know which parts you can check somewhere else.

What I find most interesting about Diamond is that she does not fit neatly into one musical category. Jazz, soul, R&B, opera, gospel: she moves between them, and that is something I have always appreciated in a performer.

The Competition and the Top Five

The Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition carries a story in its name. NJPAC tells it starting on a Wednesday night in 1942, when a Newark teenager named Sarah Vaughan went to the Apollo Theater to compete in an amateur singing contest, with $10 and a weeklong engagement on the line. She won, and that win launched a career that changed jazz singing.

The competition is open to solo vocalists of all nationalities who are not signed to a major record label, and NJPAC says singers are judged on vocal quality, musicality, technique, performance, individuality, artistic interpretation and ability to swing. WBGO reported that the 14th annual edition drew almost 200 entrants from 27 countries. Five reached the final, held at NJPAC on November 23, 2025, and they came from Philadelphia, Hollywood in Florida, New York City, Buenos Aires and London. The judges announced for the final included Ann Hampton Callaway, Jon Faddis, Nnenna Freelon, Christian McBride and Janis Siegel.

Almost 200 singers from 27 countries. Five finalists, and one of the five was from Philadelphia. That is no small accomplishment.

I noticed one more thing, and I will not make more of it than it deserves. The Apollo opens the story of the competition Diamond entered, and SOUTH’s page puts the Apollo in her bio too.

The Teachers Behind the Voice

Diamond’s bios name several teachers, and I can tell you about three of them from sources I read.

Monnette Sudler comes first. The bios spell her first name with one n, and WHYY, which reported her death in August 2022, uses two, so that is the spelling I trust. WHYY called her the “queen of jazz guitar,” a Germantown native who was a fixture of Philadelphia jazz for decades, starting in the 1970s with the groundbreaking Sounds of Liberation ensemble. She was 70 when she died. I think about what it means that a teacher who is gone can still arrive on a stage through a student.

Denise King is a Philadelphia vocalist who, according to her biography in the Jazz.com encyclopedia, started a community jazz series in 2000 that ran every Friday from May to September. The page says she wanted jazz artists to have a musician friendly place to perform and residents to have easy access to the music, and that the series drew listeners from age 2 to 85 and up. A singer who builds rooms for other musicians is the kind of teacher I would want behind anyone on our stage.

Ruth Naomi Floyd was born and raised in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, and Jazz Philadelphia’s 2020 profile says she had been at the forefront of creating sacred jazz vocal settings for more than 20 years. In December 2017, Cairn Magazine called her the director of jazz studies and part time faculty at Cairn University. Hold on to the name of that university.

The Players Beside Her

Scott Edmunds leads the trio. Cairn University’s faculty page says he is originally from Northeastern Pennsylvania, works as a pianist, composer and educator based in Philadelphia, and earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in jazz studies at Temple University, where he studied with the pianists Bruce Barth and Josh Richman. It lists rooms he has played, among them the Kimmel Center, Chris’s Jazz Café and South Jazz Club in Philadelphia, the Appel Room at Lincoln Center in New York and the Jamboree Jazz Club in Barcelona. It also names musicians he has played with, including Tim Warfield Jr., Wycliffe Gordon, Marshall Gilkes and Dick Oatts, and Ann Hampton Callaway, who was named to the judging panel for the NJPAC final. He has taught at Cairn since 2020 and is also on the faculty at Settlement Music School. When I see South Jazz Club on that list I smile, because it means he already knows our room.

John Dimase plays trumpet and sings. The bio Ensemble Arts Philly published for a holiday celebration at the Kimmel Center says he was born and raised in Albany, New York, started on piano at seven, picked up the trumpet a few years later and followed his older brother into the high school jazz band. It names the Empire State Youth Jazz Orchestra, the Skidmore Jazz Institute and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Summer Jazz Academy, then Temple University, where he studied under Terell Stafford. Sachal Vasandani, Rene Marie, Dick Oatts, Jon Faddis and Wynton Marsalis are among the musicians it lists him as having learned from and shared stages with. Dick Oatts shows up on Scott’s list too, which tells you how small and how connected this world is. Jazz Bridge booked John and his band for Settlement Music School’s Germantown branch in August 2024, so he plays the neighborhoods of this city as well as its clubs.

Line the bios up and a pattern shows. Scott and John both studied at Temple. Diamond earned her degree at Cairn in 2019, Cairn’s own magazine called Ruth Naomi Floyd its director of jazz studies in 2017, and Scott has taught there since 2020. I will not pretend to know where those lines crossed. I do recognize the shape: schools, working musicians who teach in them, and students who grow into the same rooms. Philadelphia keeps building that, one lesson at a time.

Sunday Night at SOUTH

The shows are Sunday, October 11, 2026, at 6:00 PM and 8:30 PM at SOUTH Restaurant and Jazz Club, 600 North Broad Street, and tickets are on SOUTH’s event page. If you are reading this before the first set, check there first. Come early. Have dinner, grab a cocktail and, most importantly, listen to some really good music.

People hear me say that culture is infrastructure and picture buildings. I picture a Sunday night: a lesson from a Philadelphia teacher turned into a long note, a pianist who studied at Temple, a trumpeter who sings, and a room on North Broad Street that says yes to a new voice. That system only runs when somebody buys the ticket and sits down to listen. I would rather be in that room than anywhere else on Sunday night.

Diamond Franklin and the Scott Edmunds Trio at SOUTH Jazz Club