Andrea Keller

Originally from Sydney, Andrea Keller is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts. After numerous awards in the 1990s she reached the finals of the National Jazz Piano Award at the Wangaratta Jazz Festival in 1999. In 2003 she won the inaugural Australian Jazz Award for best contemporary jazz CD – the Bell Award – for Mikrokosmos, and the ARIA Award for Best Jazz Album.

She has performed widely with Melbourne jazz groups, including Brian Brown's ensemble Flight and the Alan Browne Trio, and has recorded with Dale Barlow for the ABC.

Formed in 1997, her duo with arco double bassist Anita Hustas, Hustas-Keller, appeared at the Melbourne Women's Jazz Festival and at the 1999 Melbourne International Jazz Festival supporting Mulgrew Miller and Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen. The group also played for SIMA in Sydney, at the Pinnacles Music Festival in Brisbane, and at the 2002 Fremantle International Jazz Festival.

The Andrea Keller Quintet debuted in 1999 at the Melbourne Women's Jazz Festival, with later appearances on Jim McLeod's Jazz Track and at Wangaratta. In 2002 the Quintet's album Thirteen Sketches, supported by the Australia Council and distributed by Newmarket Music, won Best Jazz Album at the 16th ARIA Music Awards.

In 2001 the Melbourne Jazz Co-operative commissioned her to form an octet to open the Melbourne Women's Festival, where she also played in a sextet featuring Sandy Evans.

Her Béla Bartók Project, formed in 2002, debuted at the Melbourne Jazz Co-operative. She later arranged and recorded a selection of seventeen pieces from Bartók's Mikrokosmos for Jim McLeod's Jazz Track at the ABC. Also in 2002 she wrote Three Portraits of a Simpleton, a fifteen-minute work commissioned by Mike Nock's Big Small Band with Australia Council funding, and received a commission from the Australian Art Orchestra for the Hard Core concert series.

After winning the inaugural MCA/Freedman Foundation Jazz Fellowship she spent six months overseas, based in Prague and playing concerts across the Czech Republic and in Edinburgh, with workshops and lessons from musicians including John Taylor and Karel Růžička.

Beyond her own projects she has played in the Barry Duggan Quartet and in the Bennetts Lane Big Band, an eleven-piece ensemble performing original material by its members and recorded at the ABC for Jim McLeod's Jazz Track.

Artist's website: www.andreakellerpiano.com