Musicians article index

This section provides news and information about leading pianists and synth musicians.

GRAMMY Award Winner Angelin Chang Joins Yamaha Artist Family

A musical career that began “by accident” at the age of four to tame her “unruly” behavior, has blossomed into a prolific career in musical performance and pedagogy for Dr. Angelin Chang. Recently signed as Yamaha’s first Academic Performing Artist, Chang began her relationship with the company several years ago when she met Yamaha’s Mike Bates at a Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) Conference. She was left with a positive impression: “I liked hearing about all the great things that were going on with Yamaha,” she recalls.

As 2007 GRAMMY Award Winner for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance with Orchestra, the internationally acclaimed pianist has been lauded for her sense of poetry and technical brilliance. She performs in Europe, Asia, Africa and North and South America at such venues as the Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.), Kimmel Center (Philadelphia), Lincoln Center (New York), Severance Hall (Cleveland) and St. Martin-in-the-Fields (London), among numerous others.

As the first Artist-in-Residence at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Chang participated in the development and launching of the “Arts for Everyone” initiative. She has performed at the U.S Department of State, for the United Nations Women’s Organization and before the Royal Family of Nepal. An active chamber musician, she performs regularly with the legendary violist Joseph de Pasquale, The de Pasquale String Quartet, and with members of the Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras.

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Billy Joel to sell $13.9m Miami Beach mansion

Billy Joel, Piano Man, is putting his $13.9m Miami Beach residence on the market, according to Radar Online:

Of course, the centerpiece is a concert grand piano in the living room, where endless ivory-tickling jams have surely raged well into the middle of the night.

John Perry to perform at SJSU as Young Pianists’ Beethoven Competition opener

Mercury News reports:

Michel Legrand does jazz: interview with Associated Press

The Associated Press caught up with Michel Legrand, interviewed between sets during a six-night run at Birdland jazz club celebrating his 75th birthday.

He talks about improvisation, not taking things too seriously, and the marking of his 75th birthday by leading a jazz trio.

The gig was also a chance to rekindle the flames of his first passion — jazz. Legrand was a teenage prodigy studying classical piano and composition at the Paris Conservatory when he attended trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s 1947 concert there.

“Bebop — I didn’t know what it was about. It was a jazz style that I had never heard. It was a revolution to me because during the war, the occupation … the Germans forbid to have any jazz, so we didn’t hear anything. … I listened to Dizzy very carefully and then the next day I bought all the possible 78 records that I could find and it changed my life. …

“Jazz is one of the most important disciplines in music of the 20th century. … The musicians, composers or whoever who don’t play jazz, I pity them,” he said.

Young pianist with big dreams, practice time cut due to symptoms of tendinitis

The Federal Way Mirror reports on 16-year-old Rebecca Smith who has been playing the piano so much that she is displaying signs of tendinitis.

So Smith cut her practice time from four hours to two hours each day.

Although her practice time has gotten smaller, Smith’s dreams are only getting bigger. She hopes to someday reach fame as a concert pianist.

All About Jazz interviews French pianist Giullaume de Chassy

All About Jazz has interviewed Guillaume de Chassy.

February 2007, Paris: Pianist Guillaume de Chassy has just recorded his first solo piano album and he is performing an entirely solo set at the Archipel theater to celebrate its release. If he’s nervous, it doesn’t show; he jokes easily with the appreciative crowd, leading them through the by-ways of the musical journey that led him to this stage. The easy-going affability is deceptive; when he begins to play, de Chassy is all concentration.

I met with de Chassy a couple of weeks before the Archipel date at his home in a quiet suburb south of Paris. The French pianist and composer, in addition to talking about the new record, waxed eloquently and enthusiastically on subjects ranging from the genius of the composers of the Great American—and the Great French—Songbooks, to the enduring influence of Ravel in jazz, to the struggle between the harmony and dissonance in the arts generally, a kind of dialectical battle Thelonious Monk resolved in his “Ugly Beauty.”

PJ Harvey working on new piano album

Reports around the web that PJ Harvey is working on a new piano album. Though it’s not yet titled, we do know that it’ll be written entirely on the piano rather than the guitar. Release date? Sorry, don’t know. But hey, these little snippets are enough to keep us interested…

Pianist Edward Aldwell Dies in Accident at 68

Pianist and Bach specialist Edward Aldwell died on May 28 at 68, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. He died of injuries suffered when he was thrown from an all-terrain vehicle near his home in Westchester County, New York, on May 7, according to the paper.

Read article and brief obituary: Pianist Edward Aldwell Dies in Accident at 68

Duke Ellington recordings reviewed by All About Jazz

April 29th marks the 107th anniversary of Edward Kennedy Ellington’s birth and in May he will have been gone for 32 years. Yet we have still not come to terms with the magnitude of Duke’s legacy not only to 20th Century music but to the very idea of jazz itself. Too many take reductionist approaches to Ellington, ones that emphasize one or another aspect of his accomplishments without considering the totality. They fall into such traps as “the Duke’s instrument was his orchestra” or “Ellington reached his creative peak in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s” or “the Ellington band was in decline in the years before the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956”. What these statements ignore are such important facts as Ellington’s towering importance as a jazz pianist, his singular achievement of meeting a payroll 52 weeks a year for over four decades and his incredible fecundity as a composer in the last decades of his life, most significantly after the death of his musical alter ego Billy Strayhorn

Read: Duke Ellington: The Piano Player, The Treasury Shows, The Complete Gus Wildi Recordings

Vanvgelis in Paris: Studio recording from 1993

Want to see a near-legendary synthesist in action?

DVDBorn has posted a video of Vangelis improvising in his Paris studio, from around 1993.

If you don’t speak French, you might struggle with some of the interview, but there’s plenty of music to keep you entertained. Sound is a little ropey as it’s sourced from a VHS video, but it’s still worth checking out.

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