Join us at Cafe CODA on May 10th for an exciting concert by Deanna Witkowski in tribute to Mary Lou Williams! Tickets are $20 online or at the door. Show begins at 7:00pm.
Pianist, composer, and scholar Deanna Witkowski moves with remarkable ease
between Brazilian, jazz, classical, and sacred music. Her first book, Mary Lou Williams:
Music For The Soul (Liturgical Press), is the winner of the 2022 ASCAP Foundation
Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award and the 2022 Jazz Journalists Association Award
for Biography of the Year. Her seventh recording as a bandleader, Force of Nature...
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Join us at Cafe CODA on May 10th for an exciting concert by Deanna Witkowski in tribute to Mary Lou Williams! Tickets are $20 online or at the door. Show begins at 7:00pm.
Pianist, composer, and scholar Deanna Witkowski moves with remarkable ease
between Brazilian, jazz, classical, and sacred music. Her first book, Mary Lou Williams:
Music For The Soul (Liturgical Press), is the winner of the 2022 ASCAP Foundation
Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award and the 2022 Jazz Journalists Association Award
for Biography of the Year. Her seventh recording as a bandleader, Force of Nature
(MCG Jazz), reached number five on the JazzWeek nationwide radio chart and
remained in the top ten most played albums on jazz radio for more than ten weeks. The
two projects cap a twenty-year deep dive into the ground-breaking impact of Williamsâ
life and music, making Witkowski one of the few living authorities on the iconic pianist.
As a sought-after Williams expert, she has taught for Jazz at Lincoln Center, presented
at the Kennedy Center, Loyola University Chicago, and Fordham University, and
performed Williamsâ compositions as a featured guest with the Pittsburgh Symphony
Orchestra. In 2024, Witkowski completed her PhD in jazz studies at the University of
Pittsburgh and is currently writing her second book based on her doctoral dissertation,
âJazz in the Pews: âExperiments in Sunday Worshipâ in the 1960s.â Her 2025 awards
include the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation/Jazz Education Network research
fellowship and a project grant from The Crossroads Project supported by the Henry
Luce Foundation and Princeton University.
Dedicated to bringing communities together through jazz, Witkowski has worked as a
guest music leader in over one hundred churches across the United States. Her weekly
video series, âOff the Page: Sacred Jazz,â shares practical resources for church
musicians and her jazz hymn arrangements and her jazz hymn arrangements as found
on her recording, Makes the Heart to Sing: Jazz Hymns, have been purchased by more
than 500 churches. A prolific choral composer, Witkowski has won multiple competitions
for her concert and sacred works. Her modern justice anthem, âWe Walk in Love,â is
part of the Justice Choir songbook and has been sung at the sixtieth anniversary of the
Little Rock Nine at Central High School in Arkansas in 2017, at the 2018 St. Olaf Choral
Festival, and as the closing song at the 2020 Chorus America conference.
Newly based in Chicago, Witkowski teaches jazz piano at Elmhurst University.
Experience her work at deannajazz.com .
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