How did you get involved in singing?

I've been singing since I was about five years old.

I started out in musical theatre when I was five. My first play was Oklahoma, in which I played Child, and I've been singing ever since. I did lots of musical theatre while growing up and then in college, and then semi-professionally and professionally after school. It's something I've always done. I also work as a dancer. So music was always extremely important to me.

When I was fourteen years old, I choreographed a show called Rogers and Hart, A Musical Celebration, and it was [about] Richard Rogers and his first partner, Lorence Hart, before Oscar Hammerstein. I didn't know anything about this kind of music, music of the thirties, forties and fifties, and I fell in love with it at the age of fourteen. In the rest of school I always felt like a bit of an outcast, because the rest of the kids were always going out to football games, or hanging out at the mall, while I was there in love with music that was older than my parents.

So I learned this music, learned to sing it, learned the foxtrot and cha-cha and all those wonderful things and just put it away for a while because I started to work in television and film. I never forgot it, I just didn't have the time to do it so when the opportunity came up recently, where Lolita Fatjo wanted to help me produce a CD, we just sat down and did it.

We produced it ourselves and I have two offers now from labels to distribute, but we haven't made a decision yet. So it's solely available from my website which is chasemasterson.com.

A portion of the proceeds are going to an AIDS hospice in Uganda. I got in touch with them through the World Health Organisation, and we'll actually be able to get them the money without any of the corruption that you often find in third world countries. We'll be benefiting them, and as you know, the AIDS crisis is horrific over there. I'm excited to be able to be doing something good with a portion of the proceeds.

I'm really excited about it. It's extremely romantic music and very sexy too. It's an era that was certainly unlike anything before or since. Torch songs, with a kind of big band feel, a lot of horns, a lot of fun.

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