Musician's Musicians

David Thomas Roberts and Frank French Sunday, September 30, 4 PM Piedmont Piano Company 660 3rd Street, San Francisco

Among musicians to be heard nowadays we should consider first and foremost those who create music that other musicians want to play. When it comes to inspired music written for the enjoyment of professional players, amateurs, and critical listeners there are few players who know so much of the popular, jazz and classic idioms through long familiarity both as performers and composers as David Thomas Roberts and Frank French.

Roberts, renowned over more than a quarter century as a composer of ethnic-based American and Pan-American influenced music, has touched on many pertinent areas of vernacular music. Who can listen to "New Orleans Streets" and not hear echoes of Jelly Roll Morton and Robert Schumann in the same work? Roberts places his own signature and identity in solo piano works unsurpassed such as "Memories of a Missouri Confederate." These works and a plethora of others that have flowed from his pen have been played and heard time and again across the country and the world in radio broadcasts and concert halls. Those who know music know that there is stellar genius at work here.

French, whose original compositions are known and loved by a wide audience, also possesses a vast repertoire ranging from of Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier" to the Brazilian tangos and choros of Ernesto Nazareth. His voice strikes at the core of American heartland instrumental music in his most widely-revered work "Belle of Louisville." No single performer has done more to revive interest in the music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who first showed us the way through the Creole traditions of Louisiana, Cuba and Latin America. French is the man who has continued to blaze this path into the 21st century connecting the dots through jazz and popular music to the 19th century traditions.