Album Notes

**featured on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday on April 12, 2009**

with Donny McCaslin, tenor and soprano sax; John Patitucci, acoustic and electric bass; and Scott Latzky, drums
and guest vocalists Laila Biali, Peter Eldridge, and Kate McGarry

Winner of the 2002 Great American Jazz Piano Competition and a past guest on Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz, pianist/composer/vocalist Deanna Witkowski has been heralded for her “consistently thrilling” playing and her “boundless imagination” (All Music Guide). Her fourth release, From This Place, finds the disciplined paths of living
as a jazz musician and as a person of faith converging in a beautiful, genre-defying artistic statement. Not since Mary Lou Williams has there been a pianist who has melded jazz and liturgy into such joyous, accessible music that will appeal across generational, stylistic, and religious divides.


What others are saying:

Deanna Witkowski has combined The Spirituality of the Soul and Heart with The Spirituality of Jazz. These performances are, above all, prayerful. They are also properly liturgical and and should be sung and played in churches. Ms. Witkowski continues the work of Mary Lou Williams who was the first major jazz artist to compose for liturgical purposes. This music is 'healing to the Soul'.
-Rev. Peter F. O'Brien, SJ, Executive Director of The Mary Lou Williams Foundation, Inc

Going in a more sacred direction has not changed Witkowski's jazz tendencies – tunes like the bluesy “Let My Prayer Rise (Psalm 141)” and “Song of Simeon” would not at all be out of place in a club – all the improvisation characteristic of the genre are present there, and can be fully appreciated by those who don't plan to set foot in a house of worship anytime soon. The music is rich and enjoyable regardless of one's religious leanings.
-Ernest Barteldes, Beyond Race Magazine