“An Evening of POEMJAZZ” featuring renowned poet ROBERT PINSKY and Grammy-winning jazz pianist LAURENCE HOBGOOD will have its premier performance at The Regattabar at the Charles Hotel, One Bennett Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Friday, February 24 at 7:30 PM. Reserved seat tickets at $25.00 can be purchased on line at www.regattabarjazz.com or by calling: 617-395-7757.

POEMJAZZ treats a voice speaking poetry as having a role like that of a horn: speech with its own poetic melody and rhythm, in conversation with what the music is doing. To put it simply, POEMJAZZ is a conversation between the sounds of poetry and music.

POEMJAZZ is also a new CD, just recorded by Robert Pinsky and Laurence Hobgood on the Circumstantial Productions label. The limited edition CD with booklet of poems will be available at Robert and Laurence’s POEMJAZZ performances and at circumstantial.us

Robert Pinsky, the only three-term United States Poet Laureate, brings an innovative energy to all he does. In 2011, his acclaimed Selected Poems appeared. In 2010, his libretto for Tod Machover’s opera Death and the Powers: A Robot Pageant premiered in Monaco before coming to Boston’s ART. Next year, his adaptation of Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein will be presented by the Shakespeare Theater of Washington, D.C.

As Poet Laureate, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans—of varying backgrounds, all ages, from every state— shared their favorite poems, as documented by the video  segments, as seen on PBS and now at www.favoritepoem.org.

Connecting all of these projects is Pinsky’s conviction—clear to anyone who has heard him read a poem—that poetry is a vocal, bodily art, closely allied to music. For that reason, POEMJAZZ, his collaboration with Laurence Hobgood, expresses something at the core of Robert Pinsky’s art.

“In jazz, as in poetry,” Robert Pinsky told The Paris Review in an interview, “there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.”

Best known for his collaboration with vocalist Kurt Elling, multiple Grammy-nominee and 2010 Grammy-winner Laurence Hobgood has enjoyed a multi-faceted and dynamic career. Musical Director for Elling since 1995, he’s played on, composed, arranged and co-produced all of Elling’s CDs (six for Blue Note and three for Concord), each Grammy-nominated. 2009′s Dedicated To You: Kurt Elling Sings The Music Of Coltrane and Hartman, recorded live at Lincoln Center, won the 2010 Grammy Award for Best Vocal Jazz Record.

In 1993, Hobgood met Kurt Elling and began a collaboration that resulted in Elling’s signing with the storied Blue Note label, with Hobgood as his co-producer and musical director. The two became great friends and were named 1995 Chicagoans of The Year in the Arts by the Chicago Tribune.

In 1996, Hobgood joined with Paul Wertico and bassist Brian Torff to form a new trio called Union, which released two CDs on the Naim label. Since then he has found time, amidst almost constant touring, writing and recording projects with Elling, to record three further headlining projects for Naim.

And Elling’s third Concord CD, The Gate, co-produced by Elling and Hobgood with music legend Don Was, has received a 2012 Grammy nomination for “Best Vocal Jazz Album.”

POEMJAZZ is a Circumstantial Production.

This fall, Richard Connolly will produce and publish new work by jazz singer and vocalese writer, Kurt Elling; folk jazz musician and lyricist, Dan Hicks; jazz pianist and composer, Laurence Hobgood; blues pianist and composer, David Maxwell; and United States Poet Laureate (1997-2000),  essayist, literary critic, translator and teacher Robert Pinsky.

These new multimedia works are part of Circumstantial Productions Words & Music series of limited editions books and CDs.

NOTE OF HOPE, A Celebration of Woody Guthrie is based on the words and writings of the great American singer-songwriter and folk musician. The collection features Grammy-winning bassist Rob Wasserman in collaborations with Jackson Browne, Ani DiFranco, Kurt Elling, Michael Franti, Nellie McKay, Tom Morello, Van Dyke Parks, Madeleine Peyroux, Lou Reed, Pete Seeger, Studs Terkel, Tony Trischka, and Chris Whitley. The release is the first in a series of events leading up to the 2012 centennial celebration of Guthrie’s birth.

Note of Hope will be released on September 27th by 429 Records.

Fran Landesman was born Frances Deitsch in New York City on October 21, 1927. She attended private schools, and later Temple University and the Fashion Institute of Technology. While in New York, she met writer and publisher Jay Landesman, whom she married on July 15, 1950.

The Landesmans moved to St. Louis, Missouri, his hometown, where he and his brother Fred started the Crystal Palace nightclub.
This was a successful venture, giving Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce and Barbra Streisand their first breaks in cabaret, as well as producing avant-garde theatre.

Fran Landesman’s experiences sitting in the bar of the Crystal Palace, listening to musicians and audiences, led her to begin writing song lyrics in 1952. Set to music by Tommy Wolf, two of her early lyrics, “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most” and “Ballad of the Sad Young Men” became jazz standards recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand, and Sarah Vaughan.

In 1960, she began composing with singer/pianist/composer Bob Dorough who had been brought to St. Louis by Tommy Wolf to play the lead in Nelson Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side. Their song “Nothing Like You” was recorded by Miles Davis and included on his 1967 album Sorcerer.

In 1964 the Landesmans moved to London, where she wrote lyrics for a number of well-known musicians and performers including Georgie Fame and Dudley Moore.

In the 1970s, Fran Landesman began writing poetry. She published several volumes, and performed at festivals and on BBC Radio.

In 2006, Circumstantial Productions published a collection of her lyrics and poems, Small Day Tomorrow, edited by publisher Richard Connolly.

“Small Day Tomorrow” has been recorded by many singers and was the title of Bob Dorough’s Candid Records CD in 2007.

In May 2010 the South Bank Centre presented “A Night Out with Fran Landesman” at the Purcell Room and in April 2011 the Leicester Square Theatre presented ‘An Evening with Fran Landesman’ as part of the Art of Song Festival.

Fran Landesman’s last appearance was at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art on July 21, 2011, two days before her death at age 83.