BRINGING ZEZ CONFREY TUNES BACK TO LIFE

BUENA PARK, CA (May 9, 2003)—Described by The New York Times as "a savior of the old and neglected," pianist and music historian Artis Wodehouse has already made a splash with the "old" - as her well-received CD realizations of archival George Gershwin and Jelly Roll Morton piano rolls attest. Her newest project focuses squarely on the "neglected," in the person of jazz pioneer and piano roll wizard Edward Eleazar "Zez" Confrey (1898-1971).

Artis Wodehouse, the Yamaha Artist who combined technical know-how and piano artistry to create "new" CDs by George Gershwin and Jelly Roll Morton, chose the pioneering but lesser-known "Zez" Confrey as her next subject.

Zez Confrey: Piano Rolls and Scores is a four-year labor of love that took Wodehouse to the personal troves of several piano roll collectors, through a variety of reproduction and editing methods, and to the keyboard of a Yamaha DFIIISAPRO Disklavier before a single note was recorded. The 23 selections on the Warner Classics CD ring out with not only the man's music, but with his own playing touches as well.

"Each of the compositions came from a different source," Wodehouse notes. Some of them were from 88-note piano rolls with little capacity to record expressiveness; some were recovered from more sophisticated Ampico piano rolls, and some required her to hand-play them from original Confrey arrangements. Through the use of MIDI sequencing, editing and her own piano artistry, Wodehouse brought each track up to an impressive standard of articulation while remaining faithful to Confrey's original performances.

"My own hand-playing, which I would lay down in two minutes, is now on the CD next to selections that I spent hundreds of hours editing," Wodehouse explains. "Isn't that wild? It just goes to show how intricate human performance is."

Classical music critic Joe McLellan called Zez Confrey: Piano Rolls and Scores "mind-boggling."

The resulting creation delivers Confrey's playful ragtime syncopations crisply on signature pieces like "Kitten on the Keys" and "Dizzy Fingers," as well as on compositions seldom heard for generations.

After Wodehouse prepared all the MIDI files for the album at Yamaha Artist Services in New York's Chelsea district, the same Disklavier was brought to the nearby Academy of Arts and Letters, where it was used to make the recording in April, 2001 without anyone's hands on the keys.

"The Confrey idea started as early as 1990," she says. "He was always in the back of my mind. I felt it was one thing to do Gershwin or Morton — most trained musicians are aware of these things. But it was great to bring back someone who was much less well known who had a lot of merit."

"Confrey's music is just evanescent and joyous," she remarks. "It really typifies an era. The personality that comes through is very innocent, at times almost a little silly, but very wound up with the beautiful sound of the piano, with the excitement of ragtime and also the lyrical warmth of classical music."

"Then the depression came, music went in a very different direction, and he was left high and dry. Once you're lost, you're lost, pretty much."

Or not, if Artis Wodehouse takes a shine to your work.

"Zes Confrey has a unique place in our musical achievement in this country," she asserts. "Because he was also connected with the machine, the player piano, and his music is largely intended for that idiom. And that's Americana."

For more information about Yamaha pianos, write Yamaha Corporation of America, Piano Division, P.O. Box 6600, Buena Park, CA 90622-6600; email infostation@yamaha.com; visit www.yamaha.com or telephone (714) 522-9011.