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Deanna Witkowski, Live in Studio 4A

Wide Open Window, Witkowski's latest CD.
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Wide Open Window, Witkowski's latest CD.

It was her third try, but Deanna Witkowski finally landed first place in the Great American Jazz Piano Competition last October. She took top honors with her rendition of "You and the Night and the Music" by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz.

In a journal entry on her Web site, Witkowski describes what it was like to perform the ballad in Jacksonville, Fla., that fall evening: "This arrangement, which takes a Chopin etude and fuses it with the jazz tune, is something that just kind of takes over once I start playing it. I really felt the energy of the audience — almost breathing with me — as I played."

As she demonstrates in a Weekend Edition Sunday visit to NPR's Studio 4A, Witkowski's influences don't stop with classical and jazz. She also draws upon the standards of Cole Porter (playing his "All Through the Night"), Latin rhythms (she was recruited into a salsa band while attending grad school in Chicago) and a bit of blues in the style of the eclectic pianist Mary Lou Williams.

Witkowski tells NPR's Liane Hansen why she dedicated the title song of her soon-to-be released CD, Wide Open Window (Khaeon), to Williams. "I just tried to reflect in this tune Mary Lou's spirit of just being really adventurous. The melody's kind of bluesy but again the harmonic progression snakes around quite a bit and so it seems to just sort of take off in a lot of different directions whenever we play it. It's a window on something different whenever we try it."

Witkowski opens her 4A performance with the percussive Chick Corea-style "A Rare Appearance," which she wrote as a homework assignment while studying with Brazilian drummer Vanderlei Pereira. "He wanted us to write something in this typical Brazilian rhythm called baião. So this is what I wrote for class." Witkowski took the lesson in a different direction, though. "I think he liked the tune, but I don't think it's what he had in mind," she says and laughs.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Liane Hansen
Liane Hansen has been the host of NPR's award-winning Weekend Edition Sunday for 20 years. She brings to her position an extensive background in broadcast journalism, including work as a radio producer, reporter, and on-air host at both the local and national level. The program has covered such breaking news stories as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the capture of Saddam Hussein, the deaths of Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy, Jr., and the Columbia shuttle tragedy. In 2004, Liane was granted an exclusive interview with former weapons inspector David Kay prior to his report on the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The show also won the James Beard award for best radio program on food for a report on SPAM.