Healing Hearts 3
Louis Landon
2016 / Landon Creative, Inc.
63 minutes
Review by Kathy Parsons
Louis Landon?s Healing Hearts 3 is the third in a series of solo piano albums that are comprised of improvisations that were created while clients were in session at his Healing Piano of Sedona (AZ). These sixty-minute healing and music sessions consist of forty minutes of mentoring and twenty minutes of music that includes personalized music for the client?s own use. Landon created Healing Piano of Sedona several years ago to help people live life joyously, passionately, and stress- and disease-free. Landon is a Steinway Artist who has been a life-long musician. Healing Hearts 3 is his twenty-first album and fourteenth solo piano collection. Each of the thirteen pieces on the album was inspired by a different ?soul journey,? so the music is quite varied although it maintains a very calming and peaceful vibe throughout.

It is interesting to note that Healing Hearts 3 has the closest to the ideal sound Landon has been looking for on his recordings. He attributes that achievement to the mastering and editing expertise of Joe Bongiorno of Piano Haven Studio, also in Sedona. Landon has been trying to get the sound of a classical concert hall in his Peace Palace studio recordings and this album definitely has that sound, which is exceptionally beautiful - clear, warm and resonant.

Healing Hearts 3 begins with ?Standing In the Light,? a softly flowing piece with a poignant melody that gently soothes the heart - a favorite. ?Heart Song? is hushed, intimate and obviously very personal. ?Triumph of the Soul? starts out in the deep bass of the piano - very dark and lost. As the piece evolves, it gradually lightens as it moves up the piano keyboard, ending in a very positive place. I?ve often said that the piano is the best instrument to express the sound and feeling of rain and ?Night Rain? proves that point again. More energetic than most of the other tracks, the notes flow freely: sometimes smoothly and evenly, sometimes more percussive like big fat raindrops - love it! ?Tears? is heartbreak set to music, although tears are so often a big part of the healing process. Such deep emotion is expressed in this piece! Landon wisely follows sadness with ?Happy Man,? a lively slice of pianistic sunshine. ?Phoenix Rising? begins in the deep bass of the piano, obviously signifying a very dark place or crisis. Over the course of the composition, there is turmoil and pain, but then Landon gradually moves the piece into the upper end of the piano to a much lighter and more peaceful place - a stunning piece! ?Healing Time? is gently uplifting and so soothing and serene that I can actually feel it melting away tension - another favorite. ?Music Runs Through Me? flows quickly like a stream with sparkles of sunlight dancing happily on its surface. ?Balance? returns to a calm stillness that comes when things/life are in balance. Slow, lyrical and very peaceful, it?s the perfect closing for another great album from Louis Landon!

I have thoroughly enjoyed all three Healing Hearts albums, but I think #3 is my favorite. It is available from LouisLandon.com, Amazon, iTunes and CD Baby. Very highly recommended!
November 4, 2016

Recorded at The Peace Palace, Sedona, AZ, from November 2015 to February 2016. on a Steinway B.

Music mastering: Joe Bongiorno at Piano Haven Studio, Sedona, AZ



Louis Landon is a composer and Steinway artist. Formerly of New York and currently living in Sedona, Arizona, Louis has dedicated his life to music. His career has taken him around the world playing a variety of styles with some of the most recognized names in the entertainment industry. He toured nationally and internationally, playing classical music for Mikhail Baryshnikov; jazz fusion with The John Payne Band; Latin music with "Pucho and his Latin Soul Brothers?; pop music with Rupert "Pina Colada Song" Holmes; and rock & roll with John Hall, opening for "Little Feat?.

Louis began playing the piano by ear at 4 years old and began lessons at 5. As a teenager, he played guitar and keyboard in bands and went on to study music at Stony Brook University, Boston Conservatory and Berklee College of Music.

For the past 30 years, through his production company, Landon Music Company, Louis has written and produced music for film, video, and commercials. He recorded his first original album, Love Songs & Jazz, in 1994 and has since released 38 Albums/CDs on the LCI Record label. His latest, entitled Provocative Piano, was released on January 29, 2021. He has just finished up yet another solo piano album, Nighttime Piano for Relaxation and Deep Sleep, with a release date of April 23, 2021.

Louis Landon mission:

To create a more compassionate world by writing, recording and performing music that inspires love, peace, joy and gratitude.

Reviews:

?While some pianists are virtuosos in their playing and others may not be as technically proficient, but have great emotional content in their music, Louis Landon brings it all together with impeccable style and grace. His work covers diverse compositional terrain, incorporating influences of classical, new age, jazz, pop, and more in a mellifluous spectrum of moods and musical colors.? Michaeldiamondmusic.com

"He has a gift for composition that is second to none." Zone Music Reporter

"? indeed meditative and mellow, [he] sacrifices no musical rigor to achieve those ends. With backgrounds in jazz, Latin music, rock, pop, film composing, and classical piano, Louis brings his breadth and depth of experience to bear here. His playing and compositions are sensitive as they are complex and? a diverse range of influences is more than apparent.? Keyboard Magazine

Recognition:

Louis Landon's music has had over 140 million streams on Pandora radio!

Louis Landon's music has had over 34 million streams on Spotify!

Thanksgiving Piano was nominated for Album of the Year 2020 by Whisperings Radio.

Departure - Solo Piano was nominated for Album of the Year 2017 by Whisperings Radio.

Healing Hearts 2 - Solo Piano won 2016 ?Contemporary and Modern? Album of the Year at solo piano.com and was nominated for Album of the Year at Enlightened Piano Radio, also in 2016.

Healing Hearts - Solo Piano was nominated for Album of the Year at Whisperings Radio 2015.

Solo Piano for Love, Peace & Mermaids was nominated for Album of the Year at Whisperings Radio 2010.

Solo Piano for Peace was nominated for the 2009 ZMR Music Awards in three categories: Album of the Year, Best Instrumental Album - piano, and Best Cover Art by Zone Music Reporter. Solo Piano for Peace was listed at #30 of the top 100 albums for airplay in 2009 by Zone Music Reporter.

Peace Revolution! was Louis Landon's 7th CD and 2nd solo piano CD. It was #7 on the NAR top 100 charts and was played on over 50 stations worldwide.

unwind charted at #3 of the top 100 cds for the month of February, 2006 on Zone Music Reporter's website, playing on over 121 stations internationally.

Visit LouisLandon.com for bookings, CDs, sheet music, contact info and more.

Arranged for Solo Bb Brass & Piano "Garota de Ipanema" ("The Girl from Ipanema") is a Brazilian bossa nova and jazz song. It was a worldwide hit in the mid-1960s and won a Grammy for Record of the Year in 1965. It was written in 1962, with music by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Portuguese lyrics by Vinícius de Moraes. English lyrics were written later by Norman Gimbel.

The first commercial recording was in 1962, by Pery Ribeiro. The Stan Getz recording featuring the vocal debut of Astrud Gilberto became an international hit. This version had been shortened from the version on the album Getz/Gilberto (recorded in March 1963, released in March 1964) which had also included the Portuguese lyrics sung by Astrud's then husband João Gilberto. In the US, the single peaked at number five on the Billboard Hot 100, and went to number one for two weeks on the Easy Listening chart. Overseas it peaked at number 29 in the United Kingdom, and charted highly throughout the world.

Numerous recordings have been used in films, sometimes as an elevator music cliché. It is believed to be the second most recorded pop song in history, after "Yesterday" by The Beatles. The song was inducted into the Latin Grammy Hall of Fame in 2001. In 2004, it was one of 50 recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry. In 2009, the song was voted by the Brazilian edition of Rolling Stone as the 27th greatest Brazilian song.

Ipanema is a fashionable seaside neighborhood located in the southern region of the city of Rio de Janeiro.


Helô Pinheiro, the woman who inspired the song, in 2006.
The song was composed for a musical comedy titled Dirigível (Blimp), then a work-in-progress of Vinicius de Moraes. The original title was "Menina que Passa" ("The Girl Who Passes By"); the first verse was different. Jobim composed the melody on his piano in his new house in Rua Barão da Torre, in Ipanema. In turn, Moraes had written the lyrics in Petrópolis, near Rio de Janeiro, as he had done with "Chega de Saudade" ("No More Blues") six years earlier.

During a recording session in New York with João Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Stan Getz, the idea of cutting an English-language version came up. Norman Gimbel wrote the English lyrics. João's wife, Astrud Gilberto, was the only one of the Brazilians who could speak English well and was chosen to sing. Her voice, without trained singer mannerisms, proved a perfect fit for the song. Ethel Ennis and Nat King Cole have also both recorded the song.

The song was inspired by Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto (now known as Helô Pinheiro), a seventeen-year-old girl living on Montenegro Street in Ipanema. Daily, she would stroll past the Veloso bar-café, not just to the beach ("each day when she walks to the sea"), but in the everyday course of her life. She would sometimes enter the bar to buy cigarettes for her mother and leave to the sound of wolf-whistles. In the winter of 1962, the composers saw the girl pass by the bar. Since the song became popular, she has become a celebrity.

In Revelação: a verdadeira Garôta de Ipanema ("Revealed: The Real Girl from Ipanema") Moraes wrote that she was "the paradigm of the young Carioca: a golden teenage girl, a mixture of flower and mermaid, full of light and grace, the sight of whom is also sad, in that she carries with her, on her route to the sea, the feeling of youth that fades, of the beauty that is not ours alone?it is a gift of life in its beautiful and melancholic constant ebb and flow."

Ella Fitzgerald recorded this song on her two-disc set of Brazilian music Ella Abraca Jobim, released on the label [[Pablo today}] in 1981.

The legacy of "The Girl from Ipanema" was acknowledged by multiple aspects of the 2016 Summer Olympics and Paralympics held in Rio de Janeiro: the Olympic and Paralympic mascots were respectively named Vinicius and Tom after the song's co-writers by a public vote, while the Olympics' opening ceremony featured a segment themed around the song and the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer. Jobim's grandson Daniel performed the song during the segment, which also featured an appearance by Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen. Spotify reported that the song had been streamed on its service 40,000 times per-day in the days following the ceremony (a 1200% increase), while in the U.S., the song reached #5 on Billboard's World Digital Songs chart the following week.

Desvaríos sobre "La botijuela" - a set of variations of a Costa Rica song through Latin American dance rhythms.
Performance time: 13 mins aprox.

Legend has it that the gamonales (landlords) used to keep their money in botijuelas (earthen jars) with the purpose of insuring it against the thieves. These jars were hidden in the thick walls or floors of the houses. As time went by, it so happened that the owners of the money usually forgot the place where they had hidden it and died without finding it. According to popular imagination, the soul of every person who dies having their money buried did not rest in peace until it was found. But on other occasions the owner of the money had been so greedy in life that, even after death, his spirit was still taking care of its capital, and lashed out against the person who dared to find it and take it away. To appease the spirit, it was necessary to invoke the sound of the dance "La botijuela", so that it would not take revenge and reveal the hiding place with the booty.
The work ?Desvaríos sobre La botijuela" (Deliriums on ?La Botijuela?) was inspired by this popular Costa Rican dance and legend. It is a really divertimento for solo piano, consisting of ten variations (or rather free reconstructions) of this Costa Rican folk dance. This musical theme is a danza criolla (creole dance), a rhythm that in Costa Rica is clearly related to other international dances such as habanera and contradanza. Some of the variations of this work make direct musical allusions to the style of composition of important figures of Latin American pianism, namely: Heitor Villa-Lobos, Manuel M. Ponce, Ignacio Cervantes, Astor Piazzolla, Ernesto Nazareth and Alberto Ginastera. Other variations, on the other hand, set rhythms present in the traditional musical imaginary of Costa Rica, even though they are not unique to the country. Such are the cases of rhythms such as pasillo, calypso, swing criollo (cumbia) and tambito. All these adaptations of the original theme are always made from a traditional tonal scheme. In this way, it demonstrates how a melody can be framed with extreme versatility in different rhythmic and stylistic patterns of the continent. That is why it is accurate to affirm that ?Desvaríos on La botijuela" is a composition eminently Latin American.

From the CD "Journey To Rio" by Roger Davidson (Soundbrush Records)
Like many Americans, Roger Davidson discovered the bossa nova through the recordings of Stan Getz, and since then, the sounds of Brazil have been especially close to his heart. In four previous CDs ? Brazilian Love Song, Bom Dia, Rodgers in Rio, and Bingo ? he brought his unique spin to the music of a country that, remarkably, he had never visited. In October 2011, that changed.
Accompanied by his producer, the Argentine bassist and bandleader Pablo Aslan, Roger took his first trip to Brazil. Most of his eight days there, which he spent in Rio de Janeiro, were occupied by six recording sessions. Roger arrived with a hundred of his Brazilian compositions to choose from; the songs he recorded ? in addition to several new ones he composed in Rio ? comprise these two CDs.
?Journey to Rio features deeply emotional Brazilian love songs alongside Davidson?s French inspired compositions. These compositions enforce a sense of rooted emotion that melds Davidson?s vast life experiences of international culture with the modern expressions of Brazilian jazz.? Latin Jazz Corner
http://soundbrush.com/album/journey-to-rio/

This arrangement of "The Mexican Hat Dance" is as played by the legendary pianist, Liberace. It has all of the signature runs and embellishments as played by Liberace. Now you can play this traditional Mexican folk song in the same fantastic style!

The Jarabe tapatío, often referred to as the Mexican hat dance, is the national dance of Mexico. It originated as a courtship dance in Guadalajara, Jalisco, during the 19th century, although its elements can be traced back to the Spanish zambra and jarabe gitano, which were popular during the times of the viceroyalty. Female dancers traditionally wear a china poblana outfit, while the male dancers dress as charros.The standard music of the jarabe tapatío was composed by Jesús González Rubio in the 19th century