http://robertajazz.com/suggested-listening-jazz-piano-discography/

I also want to give the guys a chance to blow, which they didn’t have on the CD. Doing an arrangement of Beatrice which will feature Anders Bostrom (although he doesn’t know it yet), and an arrangement of a new waltz of mine which I wrote for my cat Claude right before he passed away. I think we’ll do a couple of Mintz classics as well including Shmear and Idy’s Dance. (I was thinking we should have a multi-media installation at the concert so people can see the music video we made of Idy’s Dance while we play it.

Meanwhile, a break from playing alone in my living room:

IBeam Brooklyn Piano Marathon 5pm – 11pm Sunday, December 11
Pianists from the jazz and improvised music community in NYC. I’ll be playing a twenty-minute set at approximately 9pm.
Suggested donation $20-$40
Ibeam 168 7th Street between 2nd and 3rd Aves. Brooklyn, NY

Roberta Piket & Jamie Baum Duo
6pm – 8pm Tuesday, December 27
Roberta Piket – piano Jamie Baum – flute; free – All Ages
Whole Foods Edgewater 905 River Road Edgewater, NJ

And looking ahead, a couple of performances in February and March that I’m excited about.

Click on the links below to add these dates to your Outlook or Mac Mail calendar automatically.
Fun and safe!

In February, a rare trio performance with the great Billy Hart on drums, and phenomenal bassist Duane Burno at Smalls in NYC.In March, an extremely rare opportunity to hear the full eleven-piece ensemble from my CD,
Sides, Colors at the Puffin Cultural Forum in Teaneck, NJ. Add this gig to your Calendar

Holiday Reminder: CDs make a very personal and thoughtful holiday gift. Sides, Colors is available on CDBaby.com at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/robertapiket .

Have a great holiday and thank you for your support.

Thursday, Sept. 15th
One Set Only at 7pm
Miles’ Cafe
212 E. 52nd St. 3Fl. (b/2nd & 3rd Ave.) New York, NY 10022
E/V train to 53rd St./ Lexington, 6 train to 51st St.
(212) 371-7657
$10 cover, $10 minimum

Some other local dates this month:
-Ibeam in Brooklyn with two greats – Louie Belogenis and Billy Mintz playing improvised music on the following Thursday – September 22nd.

-Whole Foods in West Orange, NJ in a straight-ahead duo with another great saxophonist, Virginia Mayhew, on Tuesday September 27th. (Yes they have a grand piano there.)

See my web site for details.

Thanks for your support!

Submission for best instrumental arrangement accompanying vocals (category 59)

Submission for best instrumental arrangement (category 58)

Submission for best improvised jazz solo (category 30)

I’ve tested these downloads on both Mac and PC. These are big files so give them a few seconds to load.

If you’d like to hear the whole CD, which we’ve also submitted for consideration for best jazz instrumental album (category 32), contact me.

I’m very proud of this recording. It’s my eighth as a leader and the first one I’ve submitted for Grammy consideration.

http://robertajazz.com/sheet-music/

To say thank you, we’re sponsoring a contest at AllAboutJazz.com. AAJ is giving away five free copies of Sides, Colors. Anyone can become an AAJ member and sign up for the contest for free starting today. FIVE winners will be selected at the conclusion of the contest on June 27th. Sign up here:

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/news.php?id=81953

The CD has being getting great reception in both JazzTimes and Downbeat magazines.

Thematic diversity is the most intriguing aspect of pianist, bandleader, composer and arranger Roberta Piket’s latest release, Sides, Colors… The strings add a pensive, striking quality to Piket’s lines and Mintz’s colorations
-Ron Wynn, JazzTimes (May 2011)

And in the upcoming June Downbeat, Robert Doerschuk wrote a lovely piece in the Players section called “Beyond the Trio”.

We’ve also gotten great feedback on our “jazz video”, so if you haven’t checked it out, you owe it to yourself to watch it: Idy’s Dance

Some travel is in the works for later this year and early 2012. For news on upcoming shows, video clips and more, please “like” my Facebook page or visit www.robertajazz.com

Thanks again for your support, and don’t forget to enter the contest!

Best Regards,

Roberta

Visit Roberta on Facebook
New CD, Sides, Colors, now available!
Watch “Idy’s Dance”: A Music Video!

(For those of you unfamiliar, in Grammy lingo a “field” is what we would think of as a genre of music. Within each field there are three or more award “categories”.)

In the jazz field, NARAS has folded best Latin Jazz album and Best Contemporary Jazz Album into the Best Jazz Instrumental album. Those who have dedicated their lives to Latin jazz are already making a passionate and articulate case for restoring the Latin jazz field; and the absurdity and unfairness of pop stars like Kenny G (the poster boy for Contemporary or “Smooth” jazz) competing with serious jazz artists is self-evident. (It should be obvious to anyone with the most basic understanding of jazz, that the “best Contemporary jazz album” award should be folded into the “best instrumental pop album” field, not the “best instrumental jazz album” field. However, a broader look at the Grammy categories indicates a more systemic problem with the categories past and present.

In perusing the new fields and categories, I notice that pop music is divided into six different fields – electronica, pop, rock, alternative, R&B, rap, and “traditional pop”. Beyond that breakdown, there are separate awards for “Best Rock Performance” as opposed to “Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance.” As another example of how sub-divided the pop music field is, one can either compete for “Best R&B Performance” or “Best Traditional R&B Performance”. Juxtaposed with these nuanced divisions, and the prestige and respect they imply, is the “JAZZ” field: one field, with only four categories. In stark contrast to the pop fields, there is no acknowledgment of the enormous diversity in the jazz genre: Latin, avant garde, fusion, big band, trad, mainstream, acid jazz, etc. are all dumped into one field, left to compete with each other in a degrading and bizarre “apples to oranges” race.

At the NARAS meeting in New York last Monday, an important NARAS official (whom I won’t name) said that there should be no boundary between jazz and Latin jazz: “Great music is great music.” By this logic, there should only be one field and one Grammy award! Is this the best answer NARAS execs can give the membership?

Ideally, peer-given awards like the Grammy and the Oscar are an opportunity to celebrate, acknowledge, and expose audiences to the best, not necessarily the most popular, of the performing arts. By now, most artists understand that the industry obsession with market share over artistry (part of the broader American obsession with money over people) is killing American culture. Will NARAS, as our representative, work to counter this trend rather than continuing to be swept up by it?