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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Björk to take Reactable on tour

Remember the Reactable I showed you last year?

Well, Björk likes it, and will be taking the futuristic new instrument on tour.

If you’ve forgotten, the Reactable features a colourful glowing surface and several blocks, which make distinctive sounds when moved.

Sounds right up her street, given that Björk also makes fairly distinctive noises!

There are currently only two Reactables in the world, and the Icelandic singer has managed to borrow one for the Volta tour. Let’s hope she looks after it.

“She saw it in action and she had to have it on the tour,” Björk’s technical director Alan Pollard confirmed.

(Via Qwickly)

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.”

Dustin O’Halloran Piano Solos Vol 2 reviewed at Gigwise

This release by Dustin O’Halloran is a departure from the guitar-based songwriters and features no songs, no guitars - just a solo piano of instrumental movements in a classical vein which cock a wink to inspiration from Satie, Debussy and Ludwig Van. With richness in it’s Eno-esque simplicity, there’s music here to sooth the jangled nerves of many a concrete-dweller and offers more comfort than a laced cup of cocoa. The ears that be decided to use two compositions for Sophie Coppola’s movie ‘Marie Antoinette’, such is their sumptuousness.

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Tokyomango’s open letter to the Mario piano guy

Tokyomango has written an open letter to Martin Leung, who is the Nintendo piano guy:

You are by far the most talented musician in the world. You play the Mario Soundtrack blindfolded the way Beethoven pounded out the Ninth Symphony without his hearing. And you look like Stevie Wonder in this picture. I love Mario too. Maybe one day we can play Mario Star Game together. (I will kick your ass!) Until then, I’m just going to continue to be amazed by your eye-less keyboarding skillz.

Have fun with the Girls in Bikinis in Brazil. You deserve it!

Nice

Miami Herald praises Jamie Cullum in concert

The Miami Herald has extolled the talents of young jazz pianist Jamie Cullum as he “gives Miami’s new Carnival Center its first pop concert in a terrific show”

“Think a fresher Harry Connick Jr., but with a hipper hairdo and some actual flair. But to these pop-seasoned ears, Cullum is much closer to the second coming of a young Elton John or Songs in the Attic-era Billy Joel for the way he treats the piano as a prop — pounding it with rock ‘n’ roll fervor, playing atop it and under it, all the while coaxing sonorous tones from its keys.

There’s a bit of Joel, too, in Cullum’s elastic vocal phrasing on his original songs like These Are the Days, a tuneful pop number from his first album, Twentysomething. Monday night, he turned it into an audience participation number, calling on half of the hall to act as saxophones, the other half to become trumpets carrying a melodic phrase. You won’t see that in the jazz loft at the Van Dyke. Jazz is largely mired in the past. Cullum, lacing his original tunes with modern hip-hop, rock or even folk accents, feels more like the future.”

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