DEANNA WITKOWSKI Wide Open Window (Khaeon)
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Pianism from the September 2003 issue DEANNA WITKOWSKI Wide Open Window (Khaeon) Remember the name Deanna Witkowski. The 31-year-old New Yorker is not far from jazz stardom with her keyboard techniques, her mastery of exotic time signatures, her imaginative composing and arranging (much of her writing includes sacred music) and her wordless vocalizing. The latter is most impressive on Wide Open Window (Khaeon), her second CD as leader. The title tune is a blues- drenched jazz waltz, allowing for clever interplay between piano and Donny McCaslin's tenor. She takes Cole Porter's "From This Moment On" over a slow Latin beat, blending her voice with McCaslin's soprano sax. The way-up samba "A Rare Appearance" blends wordless voice again, this time with tenor sax. Her blazing straightahead technique comes through on Porter's "Just One of Those Things," with great support from bassist Jonathan Paul and drummer Tom Hipskind. She cleverly fashions bookends from a Chopin etude for a solo version of "You and the Night and the Music," and ends in a heavenly mood, singing "Sanctus," from one of her jazz masses. Remember her name. -Harvey Siders Program Highlights: Week of November 26, 2003 - Deanna Witkowski Thirty-one year old composer, pianist, and vocalist, Deanna Witkowski is an amazing talent. This young artist on the rise plays music full of surprises, and her talents have received acclaim, recently winning the 2002 Great American Jazz Piano Competition. Classically trained, Deanna also admires the great works of Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hammerstein, and infuses the standards with her own creative style for unique interpretations. She solos on "Wonderful Guy," before joining Marian on "Shadow of Your Smile." March 2003 By David R. Adler Recommended Discs: * Deanna Witkowski, Wide Open Window (Khaeon) * Chris Lightcap, Bigmouth (Fresh Sound/New Talent) * Brad Shepik, Drip (Knitting Factory) * Jim McNeely Trio, In This Moment (Stunt) * Uri Caine, Concerto Koln: Diabelli Variations (Winter & Winter) * Irvin Mayfield/Gordon Parks, Half Past Autumn Suite (Basin Street) Feb. 23, 2003 -- It was her third try, but Deanna Witkowski finally landed first place in the Great American Jazz Piano Competition last October. She took top honors with her rendition of "You and the Night and the Music" by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. In a journal entry on her website, Witkowski describes what it was like to perform the ballad in Jacksonville, Fla., that fall evening: "This arrangement, which takes a Chopin etude and fuses it with the jazz tune, is something that just kind of takes over once I start playing it. I really felt the energy of the audience -- almost breathing with me -- as I played." As she demonstrates in a Weekend Edition Sunday visit to NPR's Studio 4A, Witkowski's influences don't stop with classical and jazz. She also draws upon the standards of Cole Porter (playing his "All Through the Night"), Latin rhythms (she was recruited into a salsa band while attending grad school in Chicago) and a bit of blues in the style of the eclectic pianist Mary Lou Williams. Witkowski tells NPR's Liane Hansen why she dedicated the title song of her soon-to-be released CD, Wide Open Window (Khaeon), to Williams. "I just tried to reflect in this tune Mary Lou's spirit of just being really adventurous. The melody's kind of bluesy but again the harmonic progression snakes around quite a bit and so it seems to just sort of take off in a lot of different directions whenever we play it. It's a window on something different whenever we try it." Witkowski opens her 4A performance with the percussive Chick Corea-style "A Rare Appearance," which she wrote as a homework assignment while studying with Brazilian drummer Vanderlei Pereira. "He wanted us to write something in this typical Brazilian rhythm called baião. So this is what I wrote for class." Witkowski took the lesson in a different direction, though. "I think he liked the tune, but I don't think it's what he had in mind," she says and laughs. Modern Drummer November 2003 Wide Open Window Deanna Witkowski | Khaeon KWM 200303 Deanna Witkowski pulls it open wide on this, her second album after 2000's Having To Ask -- and if anything, it proves she has abundant talent as a pianist and as a writer. Witkowski sets her path with an accent on lyricism. Even when she deconstructs the melody, there is a sense of time and space and beauty. Add her sense of harmony, and she places the music in constant flow. Witkowski pulls in several standards with an emphasis on Cole Porter in addition to her own compositions. She makes a mark as an accomplished interpreter, giving the established pieces a welcome, new color. The pull is immediate as she gets off in a free-flowing yet emphatic structure of “All Through The Night” which she shapes in tantalizing tempo switches. Her wordless vocalizing on “From This Moment On” in tandem with McCaslin’s soprano is almost hymnal, the lyrical impact compelling. Speaking in terms of hymns, “Sanctus,” which she wrote, swings joyously and appropriately in praise of God. Her solo reading of “You And The Night And The Music” is delectable and true to the core. With her own pen Witkowski brings the soft sashay of a Latin rhythm into “New August Tune,” featuring McCaslin breathing the lifeblood through his warm tenor. And on “A Rare Appearance,” he pushes the boundaries without flooding the cove. Witkowski daubs the tune with an airy vocal and opens up the melody with romps and whorls as Paul and Hipskind swirl beneath feeding the impetus. Wide Open Window makes for an enjoyable musical journey. –Jerry D’Souza Deanna Witkowski- Wide Open Window Ms. Witkowski's pronounced imagination on her second CD as a leader reminds me of how often I change my mind about a long-ago McCoy Tyner trio performance of Thelonious Monk's "Ruby, My Dear" - sorry, I forget what 1980s Prestige Records session it was but I know it wasn't SUPERTRIOS - anyway, in that arrangement Tyner threw so many grace notes in his playing of the theme, it was as if he was trying to make of it a Maurice Ravel melody. Sometimes I dig it, other times I'm like, "It's what Monk left out that made that tune, man!" Well, there's a similar rhapsodic sense of pure invention to be heard in WIDE OPEN WINDOW: you have to be in the mood for much of this CD, but if you are, it'll hook you and never let you go. Other times you may, "Hmmmm, I don't know" For example, Cole Porter's "All Through The Night" gets a slightly-up-tempo Bill Evans-like treatment with a modal feel, keeping my eyebrows at 12 o'clock high; it's ingenious and it proves that there's very little Ms. Witkowski can't do. It's just a question of whether you want to hear Porter's classic weeper reimagined to this extent. Tom Hipskind's drums are especially fluent here, matching Witkowski 16th note for 16th note. Other members of this well-rounded band include Don McCaslin (saxophones) and Jonathan Paul (bass); I think Paul may be a bit undermiked but he backs the group with a delicious tone and no small presence, particularly on the blues-flavored title track. Ms. W. seldom fails to find hidden tonal depths wherever she chooses to look: even Rodgers and Hammerstein's delightfully corny "A Wonderful Guy" starts off with a quiet, meditative reading with an undercurrent of near-religious joy. So McCaslin's throaty jump out of the gate once the rhythm section kicks the piece into gear is a surprise of near Cannonball Adderly-like fervor. Very nice surprise, as long as one is receptive. Elsewhere the force of Ms. Witkowski's argument is undeniable and simply has to be admired, or what do you listen to Jazz for, anyway? A solo "You and the Night and the Music" has the perfect diction of a Beethoven sonata. The closing "Sanctus," a more direct ecclesiastical statement, is the Christian prayer set to glowing accompaniment, deriving from a mass written when Ms. W. was music director for an obviously very hip Episcopal church in Manhattan. I like her singing, it's natural and affecting and breathy: exactly what the music called for. And Porter's "Just One Of Those Things" has the melody stripped off and the undercarriage exposed (you have to look again at the CD listing to see what song this really is) but no one can argue with the facility with which Ms. W. completely takes the song's chords apart and reassembles them in the break. Paul's bass solo thereafter is simply ferocious, and the trading of 4s before the coda is also not done just because we're following the tradition slavishly. It's done because it was supposed to be. Art is not necessarily something about which we decide what we think and then go on to something else, and never change our minds about it. It will hit us at different times in different ways. WIDE OPEN WINDOW will refuse to allow you to file it away and forget about. It’s too different and too vital. Bravo, Ms. Witkowski. - Ken Egbert 6/13/2003 JAZZ NOTES Recommended new CDs: Deanna Witkowski: ''Wide Open Window'' (Khaeon) - Backed by saxophonist, bass, and drums, Witkowski takes us on an exuberant ride through some originals and standards, all of it lively and original.