My first ever solo piano CD is mastered and we’ll start sending out promo copies soon. The release date is September August 1. (We’ve moved it up!) After years of performing primarily with a trio, this has been a scary and exciting adventure. Of course over the years I’ve done a number of solo performances (including Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz three times) but doing a whole CD of nothing but solo was a great challenge and I learned a lot from it. I feel my musicianship has developed in ways it wouldn’t have otherwise.
I’m also excited that another CD I’m on will be released around the same time. As you may know, for the last few years I’ve been spending some time in Europe every year playing with several colleagues and friends there. One of the groups I regularly play with consists of Roby Glod (saxophones), Mark Tokar (bass) and Klaus Kugel (drums). They are all phenomenal musicians, and they’re all from a different countries (Luxembourg, Ukraine and Germany respectively)! We did a concert a couple of years ago in Luxembourg, and Klaus has decided to release the recording on his own well-respected Nemu Records. It will be called “Live at Op Der Schmelz”.
What’s cool for me about these two releases happening so close together is that they are so different. The solo CD is primarily standards. In fact it’s the first time I’ve done a record of almost all standards. I felt that for my first solo recording, I wanted to start with this foundation. By contrast, the quartet plays originals by all the band members, and we improvise very freely on them. As Duke Ellington said, “there are only two kinds of music – good and bad”.
My March concert at the Puffin with the large Sides/Colors Ensemble went very well. In addition to playing the arrangements from the CD, I wrote several new arrangements for four strings, four winds plus rhythm section. It was gratifying to see how my writing chops have developed. The four arrangements on the CD took about two years to refine to the point where I felt ready to perform and record them. By contrast, this year I wrote three new arrangements in a couple months and we had one rehearsal to try them out before performing them. Progress!
The musicians were great too! They did a phenomenal job. I was lucky to have great section players across the board who can also solo – even the strings! The world is changing indeed. I’ll try to post some video from the concert as soon as I have time. I’m looking forward to the next time I get to play with this group again.
In case you’re in NY, I’ll be returning to the classic piano trio format at Smalls on July 23rd. Click here to add it to your Outlook or Mac Mail Calendar. I’ll have Billy Mintz on drums, and his friend from way back, the great Putter Smith, on bass. Putter lives in LA and has been gracing NY with his wonderful musicianship with regular visits over the course of the last couple of years. We’re lucky to have him for this night. It’ll be an evening of standards from the jazz repertoire and the American Popular Songbook.
Looking ahead, on September 14th I’ll perform a solo concert in Baltimore at the beautiful An Die Musik performance space. Click here to add it to your Outlook or Mac Mail Calendarhttps://robertajazz.com/RobertaBaltimore.ics
Thanks for reading this far. Comments, suggestions, feedback welcome.