Biography

Liz Magnes combines jazz piano with a World Music flavor to create a totally new and fresh sound blending American and Middle Eastern jazz.

New York Times “Magnes uses rumbling but unostentatious bass lines to create a rolling undercurrent that gives a sinuous flow to her performance ……It is a style that is quietly but so insistently rhythmic that when she applies it to as familiar a bossa nova as “The Girl From Ipanema”, the piece acquires an unexpected headlong energy…. Magnes takes a jazz approach to such music of the Middle East ……A Turkish prayer provides the basis for such an exuberantly driving display of boogiewoogie that one is apt to wonder if this is where the eighttothebar piano style came from”.

Liz studied classical music but it was the New York jazz world and her studies with pianist Mal Waldron that solidified her foundation in jazz. Liz as a ‘’musicians’ musician” shies from the limelight, but shines as one of the most dynamic and creative solo jazz pianists, preforming abroad and in the U.S.

Liz has performed at the Village Gate, Cornelia Street Cafe, Knitting Factory, Florence Gould Hall and Bradley’s in New York City, the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, The Barge Music in Brooklyn, as well as in jazz festivals abroad and the U.S. While living in Cairo, Liz performed at the Cairo Jazz Club, the Cairo Opera House and the Great Hall in Alexandria.

Liz performed in such diverse settings as with the late flutist Jeremy Steig at the International Red Sea Festival, Maqam with Moroccan born violinist Yeshua Azulai in East-West duets and with the Royal Danish National Choir. Her unrelenting quest for peace has afforded her opportunities to perform for peace (“Prayer for Peace”)with many superb artists, oposite Palestinian oud player Marwan Abado in Italy, and the drummer Yehya Khalil in Egypt, and with Kathleen Chalfant in New York and LA. ( Bagdad Burning, based on Riverbend, an Iraqi Journal).

Liz has composed and performed music for dance, and theatre. A favorite niche is Silent Film accompaniment, performed in film festivals in Vienna, New York and Jerusalem, BAM, Columbia University, and the Palais de Chaillot in Paris.

Some Silent Movies highlights:

Broken Blossoms ( honoring the presence of Lilian Gish at The Cinematique Film Festival)
Cinema’s First Nasty Women – Kino Lorber collection
A potpourri of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, plus Georges Melies, and Fritz Lang Silent films in concert and on video.

Highlights of performing, since 2000, upon moving to New York, include her performance with Marian McPartland “Piano Jazz” program (NPR); “Seeds of Peace” in honor of Queen Noor of Jordan; composing and performing “Chagall” at the Jewish Museum; participating in an evening hosted by The Center of Constitutional Rights, under the auspices of Vanessa and Corin Redgrave with her piano composition “Prayer for Peace”. In duo, with Hill Greene, Bass and Piano duets, and with Rosi Heirtlein, Voice-Violin Piano duets.

Furthering the belief in arts education, she was one of the three founders of the Jerusalem Workshop of Music and Arts for Children, has conducted programs of music pedagogy, a concert lecture series on jazz and piano performance, workshops for Palestinian and Israeli youth together. Liz taught music at Friendship’s Way, a project for underprivileged Muslim, Jewish and Christian children in Yaffa.
Liz holds a degree in Clinical Art Therapy and in 1979 was a Fulbright Fellow to the Salzburg Seminar as an Art Therapist.

In 1994 she held a fellowship of Artist in Residence at the Cite Des Arts in Paris, awarded by the Cultural Ministry of France.

Collaborated Piano pieces of Peace include:
Rafi Magnes’s photography exhibition at Copenhagen Cultural Capitol 96, where Liz created a looped CD composition entitled “The Holy Land Tapestries”. This was also performed live at Rafi’s exhibit at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. With Kathleen and Henry Chalfant, Liz and Rafi Magnes participated in a weeklong multimedia seminar (Beyond the Stigma) at the University of Michigan, and Liz composed and performed the premiere of “Guernica-Guernica” in “Fall of Freedom” combined with reading by Henry and Kathleen Chalfant.

Solo Peace event
Liz performed 3 venue events of “Save the Children of Gaza”, raising $4000.00 for Save the Children Foundation.

Discography
All There Is
Deep Listening
Doubles
Images from Porgy and Bess
Jerusalem Tapestry
Ladino ( available on request)
Moroccan Moods of Gershwin
Piyutim
Solo Argov
Two White Mothers( with Sandra Johnson).
Memorial compositions and Performances in memory of:
William S Rubin at MoMa.
Rachel Corey at Riverside Church
Oliver Sacks at Cornelia Street Cafe
David Arner at Kaatsbaan Cultural Center

Included in:
“Women and Creativity, Giving Birth to Sound”
Publication Buddy’s Knife

Liz and Rafi Magnes live in Brooklyn, New York, and spend several months a year in Palma, Mallorca. They have four children, Ilya, Dina, Yael and Tamar, three sons-in law, and 10 grandchildren.