Simone Dinnerstein & Tift Merritt collaborate on: NIGHT March 18

Includes Music by Tift Merritt, Patty Griffin, Brad Mehldau, J. S. Bach, Franz Schubert, Henry Purcell, Daniel Felsenfeld, Johnny Nash, & Billie Holiday

Pianist Simone Dinnerstein and singer-songwriter Tift Merritt join forces for the first time on NIGHT, a unique collaboration uniting folk, rock and classical worlds, exploring common terrain and uncovering new musical landscapes. Available on March 18h 2013, NIGHT was recorded at the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York by Grammy-winning producers Adam Abeshouse and Ryan Freeland. Dinnerstein and Merritt will launch the new recording by performing NIGHT live in cities including Munich, New York, Durham, Tampa, and Saratoga in Spring 2013.

Though Simone Dinnerstein (a Juilliard-trained classical pianist from Brooklyn) and Tift Merritt (a singer-songwriter from North Carolina whose father taught her to play by ear) could not come from more different musical backgrounds, when the two met they immediately realized that their passion for music and performance was kindred, if not the same. NIGHT features new songs written especially for the duo by Brad Mehldau (I Shall Weep at Night) and Patty Griffin (Night), as well as Tift Merritt’s own songs (Only in Songs, Still Not Home, Colors, Feel of the World), and classical selections (an arrangement of Schubert’s Night and Dreams, Bach’s Prelude in B minor). The album also includes the world premiere recording of The Cohen Variations by Daniel Felsenfeld, a solo piano piece commissioned by Dinnerstein based on one of her favorite songs, Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne. NIGHT was conceived as a song cycle developed for a concert commissioned and presented by Duke Performances in January 2011.

Of the process of creating this work together, Merritt says, “We were coming from completely different directions and taking the risk of extending ourselves into foreign territory to find each other. It was disorienting at times, especially at first. We both felt very exposed and vulnerable but in very opposite ways and places. But we really challenged each other and pulled new places out of each other. And that risk, ultimately, was really exciting.”

Dinnerstein adds, “This album has been about pushing our creative boundaries. I’ve learned from Tift some of the rules of her world – to be a good band member, not to use too many notes, to let the words come through, to keep an edge and rawness to the improvisation. In the classical world, it can be safer to play familiar music in a familiar way, but I find that a suffocating aesthetic. Music by Bach or Schubert or any composer needs to be approached in a way that’s constantly fresh. I love the idea that a song by Billie Holiday can speak to a song by Purcell, and that each one can influence the way we hear the other.”

Dinnerstein and Merritt, who met in 2008 when they were set up together for an interview for Gramophone magazine and Merritt’s own radio show “The Spark with Tift Merritt,” have been performing (and honing) the material on NIGHT since 2010. The Washington Post described their D.C. appearance in May 2012: “Merritt blew on a pair of harmonicas to add a taste of hickory to Dinnerstein’s take on Schubert’s Nacht und Träume. During a medley of reworked old-timey folk songs, Dinnerstein got off her stool and under the hood of her pristine Steinway Grand and hammered its strings like a dulcimer to accompany Merritt’s strumming of a beat-up acoustic guitar. Merritt took a seat stage left while Dinnerstein played what she described as ‘variations on Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne,’ an all-instrumental piece that brought out the melodic similarities between the original and Jimmy Webb’s MacArthur Park . . . [the concert] climaxed with what [Merritt] called the ‘painful woman’ portion of the show with Billie Holiday’s standing-by-her-philandering-man blues song Don’t Explain.”

NIGHT Track Listing

1. Only in Songs (Tift Merritt)

2. Night and Dreams (Franz Schubert)

3. Don’t Explain (Billie Holiday from an arr. by Nina Simone)

4. Dido’s Lament (Henry Purcell)

5. I Shall Weep at Night (Brad Mehldau)

6. Wayfaring Stranger (traditional)

7. Prelude in B minor (arr. by A. Siloti from J.S. Bach’s Clavier-Büchlein vor W.F. Bach)

8. Still Not Home (Tift Merritt)

9. I will give my love an apple (traditional)

10. Colors (Tift Merritt)

11. The Cohen Variations (Daniel Felsenfeld)

12. Night (Patty Griffin arr. by Jenny Scheinman)

13. Feel of the World (Tift Merritt)

14. I Can See Clearly Now (Johnny Nash)