Category: Uncategorized

I’m looking forward to having five straight nights at Dizzy’s later this month. It’s so rare to get to play five nights in a row in NYC. The music really gets going when you can play every night.

I’ll post some audio from the Jalopy gig soon. It was a fantastic night musically.

SOOOO jet-lagged. But great rehearsal today with Roby, Mark and Klaus. Tomorrow night we play at Schauspielhaus in Bergneustadt.

Poltva, with Petras Vysniauskas, soprano saxophone; Yury Yaremchuk, soprano and alto saxophones, clarinet, bass clarinet; Roberta Piket, piano; Mark Tokar, double bass; Klaus Kugel, drums, is being distributed by Qualiton in the US:

http://tinyurl.com/cq9mdd

When I logged into my myspace account today I was surprised to get hit by several “XP Anti-virus” popups. This is a fake program that actually infects your machine if you choose to install it.

This was not just a simple pop-ups that went away when I closed it. I actually could not get the pop-ups to stop or the browser to close until I went into the Task Manager and ended the process from there.

This happened despite the fact that I have all Windows and IE7 updates, and my browser is set to reject most popups. (I subsequently changed my settings to reject all pop-ups and when I logged back in there were no popups.)

DO NOT install anything called “XP Anti-virus”, or “Vista Anti-virus”. There is no such thing. (In fact, you should NEVER download any program or file unless YOU initiated the download and you know what you are trying to do.) If you see pop-ups that look like system messages warnings saying that you have a virus and asking you to download anti-virus software, don’t do it. Windows has no such system messages.

I am very disaapointed that myspace would let their code get compromised this way and not do anything about it. This malware has been out for months now. My Space should be responding to security holes in their scripts. A lot of people are going to get infected from logging into their myspace page. Please don’t be one of them!

I cancelled my Bluehost account. It took them over a week to respond to my support ticket regarding my email issues. Here’s what they finally told me:

All emails were processed by mailman but then rejected by our server because you exceeded your emails per hour for the domain robertajazz.com.

Another thing to note is that as mentioned on the mailman page of your cpanel it is not meant for lists larger than 100 emails. You may be able to get it to work for your list of 179 recipients but it is likely that you will have delays and possible problems with your lists of 400+. You may want to look into your own mailing list program that could throttle emails better for your list and give you more control over this queue and other options that you will not have with our mailing list software.

Does this make any sense? They are saying that the mailman lists have a limit of 100 people, but if you try to send a mailing to more than 50 people the remaining 50 emails will DISAPPEAR. You have no way of knowing who the emails went to! So REALLY, their Mailman setup limits you not to even 100 users but only to 50 users! Hey, Bluehost, Why would I need a mailing list program like Mailman if I were only sending to 50 (or 100) people!?

Personally I think the Mailman people should demand that the hosting companies that license their very excellent product (I believe it’s freeware) don’t abuse their good name by putting
absurdly low limits on how many emails can be sent at once and then suggesting to customers that they use their own mail client instead. The idea that the Mailman’s software does not give enough “options” is a load of crap. I am using the Mailman software on my new web host (more on that in a minute) and it’s working great. And is Bluehost seriously suggesting that it makes sense for me to have to send out a mailing list email manually to 50 people every hour (THEIR per-domain limit)? What exactly is the point of their even offering Mailman, except of course as a marketing ploy?

To their credit, when I demanded a refund of the unused portion of my hosting (six months) they agreed.

The latest motivation for me to continue my fruitless search for a decent web host is Bluehost’s Mailman implementation. I just sent them a detailed help ticket about the fact that my mailings are not being delivered. I can’t wait to see how long it takes for them to send yet another of their inane replies indicating that they barely read the message. We’ll see.

I just found another company – more expensive but they seem very personalized and competent. They also promised me that their mail servers are whitelisted with AOL. (Part of the problem with BluieHost may be blacklisted servers. The other part of the problem is that if you send too many emails (more than a few hundred in one day as you easily might with their mailing lists) they start discarding mail instead of either delivering it or throttling it. (They throttle it too so who knows when your mail is delivered if at all.)

I will go for the monthly plan this time. If it goes well I will recommend them to you.

What a fantastic trip this has been, one of my favorite European tours. Besides getting to play my own trio music, I was fortunate to play with an incredible diversity of great players. Thank you to: Kim Clarke, Urszula Dudziak, Camille Gainer, Jane Getter, Roland Heinz, Masa Kamaguchi, Klaus Kugel, Billy Mintz, Mark Tokar, Michael Urbaniak, Mika Urbaniak, Petras Vysniauskas, Yuri Yaremchuk.

Also had a blast working at the BORG in Innsbruck with some extremely talented young musicians, and meeting some wonderful people throughout Tyrolia as Billy and I went to several schools in an attempt to answer that elusive question: What is Jazz?

Acknowledgements would not be complete without thanking Maurice and Ania for their hospitality and amazing Paella last night! Also thanks for the term “aesthetic fascism” which I plan to start using immediately.

Below: backstage after playing with Urszula Dudziak in Warsaw. Left to right: Roberta, Jane Getter, Ula, Camille Gainer, Kim Clarke.

Below: “Five Spot” takes a bow after a set of improvised music in Lviv, Ukraine. Left to right: Roberta, Mark Tokar, Yuriy Yaremchuk, Petras Vysniauskas, Klaus Kugel. (Thanks to Sergey Muralov for this photo.)

It’s been an exhilarating and exhausting week. Last Sunday I arrived in Warsaw with fellow New Yorkers Jane Getter (guitar), Kim Clarke (bass) and Camille Gainer (drums) to play a show with Urszula Dudjiak. Great musicians and Urszula is phenomenal. A nice surprise was that the great violinist Michael Urbaniak also sat in, as well as their daughter vocalist Mika Urbaniak who is also a great talent.

Wednesday AM I flew to Madrid where I played two nights at Bogui Jazz for the Madrid Jazz Festival with Masa Kamaguchi on bass and Billy Mintz on drums. It was a blast. So great to play with Masa again. Of course it’s always great to play with Billy but I get to play with him all the time. I am so spoiled!

Last night we played Jazz Cava in Terrassa. It’s a beautiful space and the music was very well received.

Sunday Billy and I fly to Innsbruck, Austria for three a three-day workshop at a local school there and a gig with another great guitarist, Roland Heinz. Then I fly to Lviv, Ukraine to play with Klaus Kugel (dr), Petras Vysniauskas (ss), Yuri Yaremchuk (ts, cl, bcl), Mark Tokar (b) there and then in Sanok, Poland.

From there back to Barcelona for a date at Jamboree with Masa and Billy, then a couple of days in Berlin to unwind, and home again to NY for our Dec. 19 hit at the Kitano.

Recently a musical colleague of mine called me for a gig. We have known each other for years but haven’t played together much. She mentioned that she had had trouble tracking me down, because she didn’t have my number, and she was spelling my name incorrectly so she couldn’t find my web site.

In the “keywords” metadata section of my web page, I have my named mispelled because it used to be that this would allow people to find me even if they spelled it wrong. So the keywords read: “Roberta Piket, Roberta Picket, Roberta Pickett”. (The first one is correct.)

My parents had an analogous analog setup back when I was a little girl. They had our name listed in the phonebook twice, once spelled correctly (Piket) and once spelled with a ‘c’ (Picket).

Here’s the problem. Apparently Google changed their search algorithm so the keywords are useless.

A tactic some web masters use to draw traffic to their site is to put the keywords they want Google to find in the text of the web site, but to use the same color for the font as for the text, so the text is not visible to humans, only to the web crawling software. But Google is on to that trick as well.

So, here is my pathetic attempt to help people who don’t know that my last name is spelled ‘Piket’ to find me:

Click here for the jazz pianist/composer Roberta Pickett Click here for the jazz pianist/composer Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett
Click here for the jazz pianist/composer Roberta Picket Click here for the jazz pianist/composer Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket

You have NO IDEA how much it hurt me to type that. Here is my atonement:

Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett Roberta Pickett
Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket Roberta Picket

If you found this post because you were googling my name with an incorrect spelling, then here is the web site you want: robertajazz.com