Tracey Collins has earned extensive praise throughout New Zealand and Australia from her industry peers and audiences as an artist and entertainer. Her amazing talent and beautiful, humorous, and engaging personality see her as a highly sought-after professional musician.
Tracey has finely tuned her mastery of the keys into a stunning artform when experienced ‘live.’ Tracey is driven by her love for the accordion. She works passionately on showing audiences how vibrant and versatile the accordion is and proves that it is a very modern and relevant instrument for both the older and younger generations.
As a full-time artist Tracey is a familiar face at many festivals and events including The Americas Cup races in Auckland, NZ Fashion Week, Tarnished Frocks and Divas, Tauranga Jazz Festival, Hamilton, and Auckland Arts Festivals and many more.
In 1996 Tracey toured with the Air New Zealand Accordion Orchestra performing 26 packed out concerts throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Following this tour Tracey got the bug for performing. She began regularly playing outside the well-known café in Browns Bay “La Tropezienne” and was quickly approached to record her first album “Bonjour Paris”, which sold over 1000 albums. She later recorded two more albums “French – Live at Pastis” which sold even more. Her third was with her trio TNT entitled “Fury” which comprised many of their own compositions. She is currently working on her fourth album following her successful nationwide tour with Ryman Villages; “A musical journey with Tracey Collins”
She has been a session musician for numerous artists and recordings, was also a regular guest performer for top Radio Live talk show Newstalk ZB and a regular solo artist on Prime Television and Good Morning Show. Tracey’s original composition also featured and was performed on New Zealand Television programme “Mataku”.
Some other highlights in Tracey’s career were performing twice as a solo guest artist with the Auckland Symphony Orchestra and Auckland Choir for the “Last Night of the Proms” musical concert series and performing as a guest artist at the prestigious Petronas Philharmonic Hall in Kuala Lumper.
When not performing Tracey is also a Presenter/Actor and Voice Over Artist having appeared in and voiced numerous advertising campaigns (e.g., James Hardy and Yellow Pages), commercials and TV shows (Shortland Street, Street Legal, Sparticus) in NZ and Australia. Her biggest accomplishment and challenge to date was being selected to front the Yellow Pages Treehouse campaign in 2008 where Tracey had to build a tree house in a redwood forest near Warkworth and run it as a restaurant using only Yellow Pages advertising. She recently filmed a campaign with La-Z-Boy which is currently being aired in NZ and Australia.
In 2010 Tracey was approached by Roland Corporation Australasia to join their team as product specialist for the digital Accordion where she travelled extensively for several years throughout Australasia demonstrating at trade shows, conferences and workshops.
Tracey has two principal accordions, one of which is fully digital, which allows her to experiment with sounds and styles of music not normally associated with the instrument, therefore bringing a wow-factor to her shows, where the audience is left truly amazed.
