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Debbie Poryes

The sophistication and warm power of Debbie Poryes’s music is hard to overstate. Her highly original compositions are influenced by jazz from bebop to post-bop to modern times, as well as by 20th-century classical music and free jazz. Her voicings, melodies and touch are exquisite. Her sense of time and swing are deeply felt, and yet she can also be light hearted.

“Poryes is an inventive pianist, taking familiar standards and setting them slightly askew to re-examine them. Poryes’s originals are varied in their moods and effects, serene... powerful... admirable.” Cadence Magazine

“Debbie Poryes and her infectious gifts as an abundantly creative jazz pianist- composer-arranger points out her distinctive identity among the huge crowd of excellent pianists. Easily perceptible is her genuine, spirited exuberance for the music, the piano, and the open interaction with her bandmates — a standout quality of her engagingly personal and musical personality. Impressive, too, is how her swinging joyousness articulates every note she plays.” Herb Wong, jazz critic

Born in Santa Monica, California, Debbie found herself at the piano when she was five, practicing everything from Chopin to show tunes. Playing led to fascination with musical theory and structure, then jazz standards, composing, and improvising. Hearing Monk and Miles as a teenager, she fell in love with their music and decided to become a jazz pianist. A student on full scholarship at the University of California at Berkeley, she decided to stop going to school so that she could be a full-time professional jazz musician. At twenty, her first regular paying gig lasted a year at a Berkeley restaurant, playing five nights a week from 5 p.m. to midnight.

Debbie has always gone her own way musically, even while maintaining a constant study through transcription and analysis of her favorite players and composers, such as Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, Keith Jarrett, Horace Silver, Sonny Clark, and Clare Fischer. Drawn strongly to 20th century classical music she has been influenced by many composers such as Aaron Copland and Norman Dello Joio. In her early years as a musician in Oakland, her passion led her to play frequently at jam sessions while continuing to study classical music and jazz with local players. She composed and arranged music, and produced her own concerts with her various duos, trios and quartets in addition to freelancing with various local singers and bands. She has since headlined all over the San Francisco Bay Area including Yoshi's Jazzclub, the Berkeley Jazzschool, the Healdsburg Jazz Festival, and the Piedmont Piano Company.

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481
Album Review

Debbie Poryes: Catch Your Breath

Read "Catch Your Breath" reviewed by John Barron


Recording a disc half-filled with overdone standards should require, at minimum, an attempt at dissection and redirection, investigating any harmonic and rhythmic possibilities left over after decades of use. Such is the case with the release of Catch Your Breath, from San Francisco Bay-area pianist Debbie Poryes. Poryes' approach to arranging involves sophistication with warmth and open-ended possibilities. As a result, Amercan songbook gems like “I've Got the Sun in the Morning" and “My Heart Stood Still" sound fresh and ...

208
Album Review

Debbie Poryes Trio: A Song in Jazz

Read "A Song in Jazz" reviewed by Michael P. Gladstone


The release of Debbie Poryes' A Song In Jazz is quite an impressive one for the California pianist. In listening to these tunes mostly from the Great American Songbook, namely the opening showtune, “A Wonderful Guy" from the Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific and the last track, the vastly popular hit “People" from Jule Styne's Funny Girl , one can't help wonder just how the Bill Evans Trio might have handled these compositions. Notice that I said the Evans trio, ...

220
Album Review

Debbie Poryes: A Song in Jazz

Read "A Song in Jazz" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan


The notes ring out, and then they're gone, vibrations waning away to silence. Pianist Debbie Poryes--who has taught at the Berkeley Jazzschool in Northern California since 2000; who taught in The Netherlands for the better part of the 1980s; who worked her first regular gig playing five nights a week, from five until midnight, for a year at Martino's restaurant in Berkeley--has surely played a million notes; very few of them recorded for posterity, sadly.A Song in Jazz ...

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RADIO ACCOLADES:
  • #1 on the jazz !Earshot chart Oct 23, 2007
  • #39 on CMJ Jazz Chart, issue #Issue #1033
Les French, WMEB-Orono, ME
Debbie Poryes is a fresh voice in jazz, playing piano in a clean, unadorned style without pretention and with modern arrangements. The music pays homage to jazz' past while having a pop sensibility, breathing fresh air into these well-traveled standards.

Bob Collins, WRHU
This CD has stellar musicianship and imaginative styling of great standards and original compositions. First rate!

Peter Kuller, Radio Adelaide 101.5fm
Certainly a new voice to jazz piano with contemporary & mainstream arrangements to well known standards and her own compositions

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Photos

Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Two and Fro

OA2 Records
2011

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Catch Your Breath

OA2 Records
2010

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A Song in Jazz

Self Produced
2007

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Trio

Stunt Records
1984

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Catch Your Breath

From: Catch Your Breath
By Debbie Poryes

Videos

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