PEORIA MAGAZINE February 2023

P L A Y I N G I N P E O R I A

‘I DON’T SING ANYTHING I DON’T FEEL’ From the athletic fields at Peoria Notre Dame to the stage with Prince, LiVWarfield has always put her heart into her work

BY KIRK WESSLER

L ike everything else in her life, the way LiV Warfield chooses to spell her first name – the lowercase “i” bookended by capital letters – has purpose. It’s “because I am just a small part of it all,” she explained. “Everything else is bigger than me.” That may be a healthy perspective in any endeavor, but it’s pretty much essential if you’re to thriveon a high-level stage and survive with your soul intact. And Warfield is thriving. The Peoria native is a critically acclaimed R&B singer and songwriter, a protégé of the late icon Prince and former

collaborator with groundbreaking rock guitarist Nancy Wilson of Heart. She currently performs in Cabaret Zazou’s “Luminaire,” a high-energy extravaganza of music, acrobatics and visuals at the Cambria Hotel in Chicago’s Theater District. She'll do a concert there on Feb. 7 (tickets at 312-488-0900). Now living in the Chicago suburbs, Warfield, 43, frequently visits Peoria to hang out with family and get her fix of Avanti’s cuisine. Her visits are mostly on the down-low, but she wowed an enthusiastic audience at the Scottish Rite Theatre and looks forward to performing again in Peoria.

Among the Scottish Rite audience that night was John Cummings, former track and field coach at Peoria Notre Dame High School, where Warfield starred as a sprinter, hurdler and jumper in the mid-1990s. Cummings recalls Warfield and a couple of classmates singing for Mass one day their senior year. “Oh, my goodness, she had a great voice,” Cummings said. “LiV was a stupendous athlete, probably the best athlete I ever had. She still holds the 100- and 200-meter school records. But that voice … I had no idea she could do that. And then tomake it her profession.” She almost didn’t, though.

66 FEBRUARY 2023 PEORIA MAGAZINE