Heather Pierson • Alone at Last

Heather Pierson has had a busy and diverse career as a singer/songwriter and pianist in quite a few musical genres. She had classical piano lessons for years but in high school played with both a prog rock band and a country rock group. Since then, she has performed World music, rock, blues, country, groove music (with her group The Potboilers), New Orleans jazz, and meditation music, been in an a cappella trio, and written originals for church choirs, releasing 17 albums on her Vessel Recordings label.

All of that would not be too relevant to readers of the Syncopated Times except that her recent solo piano EP (clocking in around 26 minutes), Alone At Last, is a set of nine original pieces, much of it being ragtime. Heather Pierson has a real feel for classic ragtime as she shows on such numbers as the joyful “Happenin’ Rag” (which utilizes a minor-toned tango theme part of the time), the witty “Old Dime Box,” and the catchy “Stacks Of Apples.”

The one fault to this album is its brevity. The happily dissonant “Devil’s Rag” is just 44 seconds long and the sweet title cut is under two minutes long, as is the light stride piano piece “Beulah In Her Chair.” All of those delightful pieces could have been several times longer

Heather Pierson, who takes an effective 1920s-type vocal on “Popinjay Blues,” has the potential to become an important voice in the ragtime world. Hopefully she will spend a lot more time exploring this music in the future.

Heather Pierson • Alone At Last
Vessel VSL 018
www.heatherpierson.com

Scott Yanow

Since 1975 Scott Yanow has been a regular reviewer of albums in many jazz styles. He has written for many jazz and arts magazines, including JazzTimes, Jazziz, Down Beat, Cadence, CODA, and the Los Angeles Jazz Scene, and was the jazz editor for Record Review. He has written an in-depth biography on Dizzy Gillespie for AllMusic.com. He has authored 11 books on jazz, over 900 liner notes for CDs and over 20,000 reviews of jazz recordings. Yanow was a contributor to and co-editor of the third edition of the All Music Guide to Jazz. He continues to write for Downbeat, Jazziz, the Los Angeles Jazz Scene, the Jazz Rag, the New York City Jazz Record and other publications.