Joan Stiles On Piano Jazz

Joan Stiles On Piano Jazz, with Guest Host Jon Weber

by Grant Jackson

Pianist Joan Stiles dedicated herself to jazz after she'd begun classical piano study in college. As a teenager, she sang and played in pop groups; the only jazz records she owned were a solo Thelonious Monk record and Bill Evans' Portrait in Jazz (not a bad start for any beginning jazz student's library).

As a young woman in New York, she ventured by herself to see pianist Mary Lou Williams playing at The Cookery, on a tip that Williams' command over the keyboard was a sight to behold.
Photo: Julie Brimberg

Today, Stiles is a working artist playing her own dates in clubs like The Blue Note, Birdland and Iridium, and is highly respected in jazz circles. She is also a full-time educator at the Manhattan School of Music and the New School University Jazz Program. For the past 10 years, she has been spreading the music of Mary Lou Williams through a popular lecture/demonstration titled "Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band." On this episode of Piano Jazz, Joan Stiles stops by to talk with guest host Jon Weber and to play some tunes of her own, as well as a few by Williams, Thelonious Monk, Fats Waller and more.

Stiles kicks off the session with her take on Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Surrey With the Fringe on Top," tapping into the spirit of Monk through her sense of time and angular phrasing.

"It's a little bit of the horse's hoofs on the surrey — that's why I slowed it down at the end, as the horse is getting to the destination," Stiles says, referring to the lyric of the tune from Oklahoma. "And there's a bit of Richard Rodgers meets Thelonious Monk."

Complete on  >>  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129933144&sc=nl&cc=jn-20100919