Her love for the music of earlier decades — the electric funk of the 1970s, the big-band swing of the jazz tradition, the raw emotional intelligence of soul and R&B — is not nostalgia. It is fascination. She is drawn to the spirit of those eras: the craft, the groove, the humanity, the refusal to make music that was merely polished or technically correct. She wants what those musicians had — aliveness — and she is determined to bring it into something entirely her own.

On stage, Irmi is something rarely found in equal measure: sophisticated and playful, emotionally powerful and genuinely funny, glamorous and utterly human. She can hold a room in complete silence with a single phrase, then break the spell with a raised eyebrow and a perfectly timed grin. That combination — that refusal to choose between depth and delight — is what makes her performances memorable long after the last note fades.