Biography
A longtime figure in the San Francisco Bay Area jazz community, Debbie Poryes works as a bop-centered pianist on acoustic instruments whose melodic introspection draws from the example of Bill Evans (the pianist rather than the saxophonist), Marian McPartland, Ahmad Jamal, and Herbie Hancock before his fusion period. She first touched an acoustic piano at age five, yet jazz did not initially dominate her listening; Northern California childhood exposed her instead to European classical repertoire and the songs of Simon & Garfunkel. Those folk-rock and soft-rock figures of the 1960s and 1970s prompted the teenage Poryes to set the piano aside temporarily in favor of guitar and vocals. One of her adolescent voice instructors was Judy Davis, whose roster of notable pupils later included Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane and Barbra Streisand. A full scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley allowed her to leave home at seventeen, and it was during those Berkeley years that jazz became her central pursuit. Exposure to such pianists as Evans, Jamal, and Thelonious Monk led her to return the acoustic piano to prominence and commit to a career as a jazz instrumentalist. At twenty she secured a steady jazz engagement at the Berkeley restaurant Martino’s, appearing there five nights weekly, and throughout the 1970s she performed at numerous additional Bay Area clubs. Most of the 1980s, however, found her based in the Netherlands, where she cut her debut recording, Debbie Poryes Trio, for Challenge Records—one of Holland’s leading independent jazz labels—in 1982. While abroad she achieved fluency in Dutch, wrote soundtracks for the Dutch documentary firm Codia Audiovisual, and toured Europe both with her own ensembles and as a member of an eleven-piece group directed by bassist-arranger John Clayton of the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra. Her return to Northern California occurred in 1990, after which she resumed regular activity on the local jazz circuit. In 2000 she joined the faculty of UC Berkeley’s Jazzschool, and between 2006 and 2007 she recorded the trio album A Song in Jazz for Jazzschool Records.
Albums
