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Biography
In the time since Roberta Piket returned to her native New York, the pianist/composer has played professionally as a sidewoman with David Liebman, Rufus Reid, Michael Formanek, Lionel Hampton, Mickey Roker, Billy Mintz, Harvey Wainapel, Eliot Zigmund, Benny Golson and the BMI/NY Jazz Orchestra and has twice been a featured guest on Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz, on National Public Radio. It is in her work as a composer and bandleader, however, that the depth of Roberta's talent becomes most evident. Roberta, who holds a B.S. in Computer Science which she earned concurrently with her music degree, turned away from a future as a software engineer after a year in that field to pursue an inevitable path in creative music. A gifted composer, Roberta was a finalist in the Thelonious Monk BMI Composers' Competition. Roberta's trio has toured Japan and Spain as well as the U.S. She has performed her music at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., at the Earshot Festival in Seattle, at the Rochester (NY) Jazz Festival, and in New York at Small's, the Blue Note Club, Birdland, the Knitting Factory and the Kitano. Roberta's CDs frequently make the "best of" lists of the major jazz magazines. Whether performing her original compositions or highly personalized reworkings of standards, Roberta's daring rhythmic modulations and vast harmonic expansiveness set a new standard for the piano trio. "September of Tears", released in Japan, finds Roberta joining forces with Rufus Reid and Billy Hart for an adventurous program of originals and reworked standards. The recent release, Love and Beauty, features the virtuosic gifts of bassist Ratzo Harris and drummer Billy Mintz. During its three-year incarnation, this working group toured the West coast three times and performed regularly in New York. A confessed "closet singer", Roberta also makes her vocal debut on Love and Beauty. Roberta's Nabokov Project sets five poems by Vladimir Nabokov to music for piano, violin, mezzo-soprano with percussion, and speaker. It blends neo-classical harmonic concepts with lush melodies and free improvisational sections. Roberta's recordings have earned rave reviews in JazzTimes, downbeat, the Washington Post, Piano & Keyboard, and Jazziz, as well as other publications. A musical pioneer in more ways than one, Roberta was the first and only woman leader with a release on the Criss Cross label (the 1997 Unbroken Line). Roberta's electric band, Alternating Current,"boasts a retro-futurist vibe", according to the Village Voice. Exploring a new sonic palette with a vintage Wurlitzer electric piano, Roberta brings her harmonically adventurous sensibility and serpentine lines to a supremely grooving experimental quartet. The group has toured six states and performed in several festivals. Roberta maintains an active schedule as an educator. She has held master classes at the Eastman School of Music (where she performed solo and in duo with Marian McPartland), Rutgers University, Cal Arts, Duke University, the Northwestern University Composers' Colloquium, and many others in the U.S., Europe and Japan. She has coached ensembles at Long Island University, has several private students, has served as a panelist for the Queens Council on the Arts grant review process and has taught at the Litchfield Jazz Camp and the Vermont Jazz Center. She is also the author of the Jazz Piano Vocabulary series of workbooks, published by Muse-Eek Publishing. Roberta occasionally performs on B3 organ, playing at clubs such as Harlem's Showman's. She has also written several big band compositions, three of which are in the repertoire of the Seattle Women's Jazz Orchestra. In recent years she has performed with some of Europe's finest creative musicians, including drummer Klaus Kugel, saxophonists Roby Glod, Petras Vysniauskas and Yuri Yaremchuk, and bassist Mark Tokar. She plays in a free improvisation trio with drummer Billy Mintz and alto saxophonist Mark Reboul, and occasionally sings and plays standards at senior citizen homes in the New York area. Selected Discography As a leader:
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