Dena DeRose & Renato Chicco

Review:

This is the two hundred twenty-eighth in a series of special Jazz on the Tube reviews of live stream performances.

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A major jazz pianist and singer for the past 25 years, Dena DeRose was classically trained, drawn towards jazz as a teenager, survived a serious battle with carpal tunnel syndrome that forced her to lay off the piano for two years, sang to fill in the gap, recovered from her physical problems, and has had an important career since the late 1990s.

She has led at least 14 CDs, worked with a long list of luminaries (including Scott Hamilton, Ray Brown, Clark Terry, Benny Golson, Houston Person and Ken Peplowski), and been a busy educator.

Pianist Renato Chicco, who is from Austria, worked with Lionel Hampton (1991-92), was musical director of Jon Hendricks & Company (1991-97), has appeared on over 50 recordings as a sideman, and has led several albums of his own; like Dena DeRose, he teaches at the University of Music in Graz, Austria.

Thought of as a successor to Shirley Horn although she has her own voice and piano style, Dena DeRose on her LiveStream from Sept. 19, 2020, performs sophisticated if mostly obscure standards (best known is Bob Dorough’s “Nothing Like You”) with warmth and swing before a live studio audience.

For the second half of the program, her vocals are accompanied by pianist Chicco, a set that includes a lush “Autumn In New York,” a swinging “Day By Day” (which has a particularly energetic tradeoff between the two), and a waltz version of “How Deep Is The Ocean.”

This performance serves as an excellent introduction to the talented Dena DeRose

-Scott Yanow