Nadine June Jansen was born in Sacramento, California, and studied both piano and trumpet, and one day figured out how to accompany herself, playing piano with the left hand and trumpet with the right. She attended San Jose State College until being discovered in the 1950s by famed bandleader Horace Heidt for tours of movie theaters across the nation. After working in New York City and Chicago, she was booked in 1959 to play a week at Tony Hart’s Band Box, a Phoenix nightclub. When that booking was extended, she bought a home in Scottsdale, and began performing in major hotels including the Valley Ho, Westward Ho and Del Webb’s Townehouse. In the 1980s, she led Monday-night jam sessions at the Hermosa Inn that continued to be legendary.
She was well-deserved of the invitation to perform in an all-star all-female band at the Kansas City Women’s Jazz Festival in the early 1980s. She performed a Gershwin tribute with the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra in 1986, was featured in a “Women in Jazz” concert in October 1988 at symphony hall with Marian McPartland and Judy Roberts, and was a guest on McPartland’s “Piano Jazz” NPR radio show in January 1988.
She retired in 2003 after performing for years at J. Chew & Co. in Scottsdale, AZ, where many luminaries sat in with her, including Les McCann, Ellis Marsalis and Wynton Marsalis. Following her death in northern California on August 7th, 2008, at the age of 79, the Nadine Jansen Scholarship Fund of The Young Sounds of Arizona was established.
The chief motivator behind this CD project was John Dixon, Arizona’s esteemed music historian-archivist, to whom Nadine loaned recordings from her life’s collection. The second key person was Jack Miller, an engineer in the 1960s at Audio Records when Nadine’s demos and the original “Ala Mood” vinyl album were created. He is the technical genius who cleaned up aging and deteriorated originals using Waves Restoration to create the master disc for this CD. Both spent hundreds of hours in their commitment to preserve Nadine Jansen’s music for posterity. This exceptional CD of music by an exceptional musician is the result.
– Liner Notes by Patricia Myers