Pete Malinverni
"One listen and you'll know why Pete Malinverni is one of New York's great pianists"
Michael Ryan The Boston Herald
"Malinverni -- audacious and exquisite." Jim Macnie, Village Voice (New York)
"Dashing but without ego, Malinverni tells tales short on embellishment and long on resonance." ****Four stars. Fred Bouchard, DownBeat Magazine
"Pete Malinverni is one wild cat…his playing can be dark, gritty and oddly rapturous…he digs into the piano and emerges with exotic treasure…" Karl Stark, Philadelphia Inquirer
"Pete Malinverni doesn't seem capable of playing a dishonest line", observed Down Beat Magazine in a four-star review of one of his many recordings. Never content with some current level of mastery, Malinverni continues to seek new language and a widening and deepening of the jazz idiom. He has received performance and composition grants from the NEA, the Meet the Composer Fund, The Jazz Composers' Collective and Symphony Space and has written for and recorded in the solo piano, piano trio, quartet, quintet, gospel choir and big band formats in addition to arranging and producing recordings for several others. Each of his twelve recordings, most recently "A Beautiful Thing!", has been released to excellent notices in Jazz and general publications and he continues to receive heavy radio airplay, several of his recordings having resided in the Top Ten nationally. Getting to the core, Pietro d'Ottavia, writing in Italy's La Repubblica, said, "In this artist one must recognize a brilliant vein of composition along with an original, pianistic voice."
Since coming to New York in 1981, Pete Malinverni has made a mark for himself in live and recorded performances in New York's Carnegie Recital Hall, Symphony Space, The Village Vanguard and the Blue Note and worldwide in tours of North and South America, Europe and Japan, earning him entry in the "Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz" as compiled by Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler. His appearances on NPR's "Piano Jazz" with Marian McPartland, including one in collaboration with Elvis Costello, have been hailed as informative and engaging presentations. He is also a writer on music, publishing articles in publications worldwide as well as contributing liner notes for his and many other recordings.
From 1992-2010 Pete served as Minister of Music at the Devoe Street Baptist Church in Brooklyn, NY and is pianist/conductor of the Westchester Reform Temple in Scarsdale, NY. In those capacities he has explored the critical intersection between art and spirituality. He serves on the Jazz Studies Faculty at the Conservatory of Music at SUNY Purchase College, teaching Harmony, Improv, History and Piano and where he founded the Soul Voices, a student choir whose mission is to explore the music of the African-American tradition.
Jody Sandhaus
Every now and again a singer comes along who so personally delivers a song that we ourselves are moved to feel more deeply – to appreciate life more fully, in all its joy and pain; and to see things as she sees them, as facets of the wonderful gift that is life. Jody Sandhaus is such a singer. John Williams, writing in Hot House NY Jazz Nightlife Guide, said, "Jody sings so gently and carefully about love [we] imagine and define with clarity our arrival to love and our continuance in that dream".
Since the 1990s, Texas-born and New York-raised Jody Sandhaus has been a fixture on the musical scene, charming audiences in New York and around the world. Along with her live performances, her four solo recordings have gained Jody successively greater notice in the jazz press and beyond. Reviewing "Winter Moon" in JazzTimes, Chuck Berg wrote, "Jody Sandhaus is an evocative vocalist whose sultry after-hours delivery meshes perfectly with exquisitely excruciating torch tales. On medium paced gambols she flirts with breezy aplomb." Berg also remarked that, "clearly, Sandhaus is a singer who's also a musician. She phrases like a horn and swings with uptown élan."
Like all good art, jazz singing can and should address all colors in the spectrum of human emotion. Perhaps too much media attention is given to those who choose to focus solely on the grays and paler shades of life. Jody Sandhaus gives those more muted sensibilities their due, and in fully explored readings, but they are more clearly discerned in contrast to Jody's unalloyed expressions of the brighter side of life. Her native joy at living allows Jody to see–and, indeed, through her singing, encourages us to see–those full and rich hues that remind us of the gift that life truly is.
