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Owen McNally writes about jazz and other music events in Connecticut's Jazz Corridor, stretching from the tip of Fairfield County, right through New Haven and Hartford, and on up beyond the state into the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. Keep up with the best our area has to offer in music.

Pianist Joyce DiCamillo Leads Trio Con Brio at Swinging Shoreline Jazz Spot

Joyce DiCamillo
Joyce DiCamillo with drummer Martin Drew and bassist Paul Morgan.
Music always came naturally to Joyce DiCamillo, who found her calling as a very young child.

Classically trained and a member of the elite International Roster of Steinway Artists, the Stamford-born-and-bred pianist Joyce DiCamillo is most celebrated for her three decades of consummate mastery of the fine art of the jazz piano trio.

But that doesn’t mean that DiCamillo, who leads her jazz trio on Friday, July 10, at 8:30 pm at Old Lyme’s Side Door Jazz Club, is in any way short of precious memories of grooving with a diverse variety of superstar stylists. DiCamillo, who grew up with an ecumenical passion for Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, The Beatles, Miles and Trane and Bill Evans, is, for example, without a doubt the only pianist in the world who has both toured internationally with disco diva Donna Summer and also backed the modern jazz titan Phil Woods at a club in Bridgeport.

Most surprising, of course, is the modern jazz piano maestro’s link with disco, which occurred after DiCamillo had recorded her first acclaimed trio album in 1992. It came about when she just so happened to be playing in a backup band in Westport at a charity fund-raiser featuring a number of artists, including Summer, the crowned Queen of Disco, a multi-Grammy Award winner and one of the best-selling pop artists of all-time.

Summer, it turned out, loved the band conductor’s work that night so much that she hired him for her new touring band. And he, in turn, asked DiCamillo and the rhythm section to sign on aboard with Summer’s just formed road band.

DiCamillo's all-time favorite gig happened the night she and her trio were called in by surprise to back Phil Woods.

“Oh, God! I love disco music, but am I going to get to use only three fingers out of ten fingers? What is this going to be like?” DiCamillo remembered asking herself with some trepidation back then as she was about to wade into the glitz and glitter of the disco world.

To her utter surprise, it turned out to be a terrific experience, touring throughout the United States, Mexico, and Chile, playing for huge crowds in cavernous arenas with massive Jumbotron screens while backing Summer’s monumentally powerful pipes. And, surprise of all surprises, DiCamillo even got to use all ten fingers on the keyboard.

“It was such a thrill,” she said by phone from her Stamford home, “because it was all power music, high energy every night. The band was phenomenal, and Summer’s voice was so magnificent, and never failed her even with all those high notes she hit night after night. She could have done anything with that remarkable voice—even jazz—but was so beloved as a disco artist that that’s what she had to do.”

Credit Joyce DiCamillo
Joyce DiCamillo with Phil Woods.

Out of countless jobs leading her trio and in collaborations with top jazz players, DiCamillo’s all-time favorite gig happened the night she and her trio were called in by surprise to back Phil Woods, a longtime idol, even one of her primary sources of inspiration.

“When I first heard that my trio was going to be backing Phil Woods for an entire night, I just about had apoplexy,” she said of that initial adrenaline rush of both fear and delight.

“Woods was just back from Europe then and we -- me, my friends and family -- were all Phil Woods fanatics. We were like groupies. So that whenever he played in New York, I was right in the front row and just couldn’t get enough of him,” she said.

That most memorable gig occurred, she remembers, on her birthday, which proved to be a good omen leading to many happy returns, including a fine performance that night and the beginning of a lasting friendship with Woods.

“It was like being on Cloud Nine, with just one great tune after another for four hours,” she said with virtually total recall, almost as if the Woods collaboration happened last night instead of years ago.

Music always came quite naturally to the gifted DiCamillo, who seems to have had a calling she couldn’t refuse right from very early childhood.

Credit Ovi Gherman / Creative Commons
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Creative Commons

“My grandmother had an old player piano,” she said. “When I was about four, I began picking out melodies on the keyboard. When my parents heard me picking out Mary Had a Little Lamb and other tunes they could recognize, they were a little shocked and said, ‘Maybe we need to get this girl some piano lessons.’ They found me a fabulous teacher, and come hell or high water, you couldn’t bribe me with anything to skip my piano lesson. I’d just say, ‘I have a lesson today.’” 

DiCamillo's undying love for the piano has burned brightly through her classical studies at the Syracuse University School of Music right up to the present moment. Along the way, she had inspiring teachers and famous mentors, including pianists Billy Taylor and Marian McPartland, the classy jazz doyenne who once featured her as a guest on her award-bedecked NPR show, Piano Jazz.

At Syracuse, where DiCamillo earned a degree in music theory and composition with honors in piano, her classical mentor was the noted concert pianist Frederick Marvin, a disciple of the 20th century, Chilean piano genius Claudio Arrau.

Credit Allan Warren / Creative Commons
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Creative Commons
Claudio Arrau in 1974.

While classical studies gave her the rock-solid technical foundation for her jazz improvisations, DiCamillo also credits her success to having grown up in the ‘50s and early '60s. It was, she said, a Golden Age for music that opened her insatiably music-hungry, classically trained mind to the siren call of rock, pop and jazz. Strongest of all was the lure of jazz piano, beginning with her discovery of Dave Brubeck’s recordings, on through the keyboard world to, perhaps her most enrapturing find, Bill Evans and his trio masterworks.

While classical was her field of study and jazz was to become her lifetime commitment, rock and pop were also influences as well, she said.

"As soon as I started hearing jazz or swing or anything that could be construed as jazz on TV, I automatically gravitated toward it for some reason." DiCamillo

“I used to listen to Murray the K (a legendary rock disc jockey) in bed at night on my transistor radio, and knew all the Top 40. I fell in love with funk and everything else as it came along. All of this other music informs your playing too because I was not a jazz snob,” she said.

“People of my generation really had a charmed existence because we were actually there for all that. It was the ‘50s when I was a child and musically there was so much great stuff happening then.”

It was so surpassingly great, she said, that you can sometimes forget just how great it actually was unless you actually reflect on it for a moment.

“A couple years ago,” she said to illustrate her point, “I went back and listened to all my Miles Davis stuff from back then and began thinking, ‘Oh, my God! Can you imagine being around for all this!’ And then I thought to myself, ‘Well, you were!’ ’’

“I grew up in an exceptional era,” she added, “when you could even hear great music on TV, including The Ed Sullivan Show that had the best of the best,” she said of those early formative years.

“As soon as I started hearing jazz or swing or anything that could be construed as jazz on TV, I automatically gravitated toward it for some reason. It just got to me. I would run to the piano and try to pick out the melodies that I had just heard, or play along with what I was hearing. I just had the need to do this," she said.

“The piano was there," she explained, "and I was drawn to it because of what I heard. I was attuned to this music, and it didn’t hurt that my father had a great record collection and was a lover of music.”

Credit Joyce DiCamillo
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Joyce DiCamillo

One of her earliest recollections is of herself as a toddler sitting underneath the family dining room table blissfully playing those records for hours on a record player set on the floor.

“Maybe I had a melancholy streak,” she joked, “but I loved listening to love songs by Tony Bennett and other singers. I would just sit there under the table and cry. So, without even knowing it, I developed an appreciation for the American Songbook. And it stayed with me, obviously, all this time, and became the bread and butter of what I would later play as a jazz pianist.” 

By elementary school, DiCamillo was such a proficient player-- thanks to her beloved classical piano lessons--that she quickly became the first-call accompanist for the school choir and talent shows.

“I was maybe a music geek, or whatever they call that today. But everybody came to me. If we had a talent show at school and somebody wanted to sing You’re a Grand Old Flag, they’d come running to me. ‘Joyce, can you play You’re a Grand Old Flag for me at the talent show?’, they’d ask. And I’d say, ‘Okay,’ and then I’d run home and learn it.”

Credit Jazz Society of Oregon
Todd Strait plays drums for the Joyce DiCamillo Trio.

By high school, she was already going out playing gigs and getting paid for it. Her first paid job was at 14. It earned her $25.00 to $30.00 or so, which she said she probably invested in buying jazz LPs at the local record shop.

“It was wonderful. It was so exciting,” she said of those first play-for-pay gigs. “I was out late at night, all dressed up…the whole thing!”, she said of her first adolescent steps into the adult world.

Starting with local gigs on her home grounds in southern Connecticut, DiCamillo’s jazz world first expanded to the Tri-State area, then out onto the national and international scene.

Besides appearances in major festivals in Ireland and Italy, she has played at such premier venues as the Kennedy Center and graced major Big Apple clubs ranging from The Blue Note to Birdland. She’s performed with a host of jazz luminaries including James Moody, Houston Person, Bob Mintzer, and Steve Marcus, among many others, and opened for such royalty as Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and Nancy Wilson.

Joyce DiCamillo with James Moody.
Credit Courtesy Joyce DiCamillo
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Courtesy Joyce DiCamillo
Joyce DiCamillo with James Moody.

And that’s just the tip of her resume that includes a variety of roles as a concert and festival producer and a highly regarded classical teacher/jazz coach who has gone on the road to give master classes in more than 100 colleges and universities throughout the nation.

A mother of two now-adult children whom she raised with her husband, DiCamillo has also found time to be a dedicated arts activist who, among other roles, served as the executive director of the Stamford Young Artists Philharmonic for 24 years before stepping down recently.

Credit Yoshi Waki
Yoshi Waki accompanies Joyce DiCamillo on the bass in her trio.

Last fall, in a new, ambitious advocacy venture, she launched Project Music, a non-profit education program for underprivileged kids in Stamford, her hometown that she still calls home.

For all her varied accomplishments on and off the bandstand, DiCamillo forever maintains a special place in her heart and mind for the chamber jazz trio format that has earned her praise for her recordings and countless live performances. Her trio’s hallmarks are nuance, swing, a wide and deep emotional range and dynamic interplay.

“I find the trio setting special,” she said, “because when you find that simpatico link with other players, it’s a magical thing.”

“If you could only bottle it. It’s just ecstasy.”

DiCamillo will distill her VSOP trio magic with her chamber jazz collaborators, the Japanese-born bassist YoshiWaki and the noted drummer Todd Strait.

It marks her second appearance at The Side Door, the intimate shoreline club she calls “a gem…an oasis in the wasteland” where everything from the lighting and sound to the piano is all well-tuned.

Tickets and information: thesidedoorjazz.com and (860) 434-0886. The Side Door Jazz Club is at 85 Lyme Street, Old Lyme.

Please submit press releases on upcoming jazz events at least two weeks before the publication date to omac28@gmail.com. Comments left below are also most welcome.

Owen McNally writes the weekly Jazz Corridor column for WNPR.org as well as periodic freelance pieces for The Hartford Courant and other publications.

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