Gerry Schubert

Pianist Gerry Schubert unapologetically creates a lushly romantic, sweepingly cinematic rhapsodic music that aims at your heart, more so than panders to a generic, commercial demographic statistic. His Gallery Records CD Life in the Moment boasts pop-flavored fully orchestrated anthems reminiscent of Charles Fox or Henry Mancini. Schubert was born in Washington, D.C., to a Hungarian lawyer father and a college-educated Connecticut mother. His parents both played piano, an uncle played in violin and chamber orchestras, and his uncle's two sons were professional concert musicians. As a child, Schubert watched his cousins play piano and violin and would noodle around on his mother's piano. At age nine, his family moved to Maryland and Schubert began taking after-school piano lessons; he later began studying with a classical piano professor. During this time, Schubert began making up songs and re-arranging songs that he already knew. Friends and family of Schubert encouraged him to continue to hone his considerable composing talents. At 16, Schubert started playing pop music, forming a nine-piece soul band called the Atlantics, backing the Drifters for local engagements. In college, he formed his own quartet playing at diners, parties, and other special events. His musical tastes grew to include Antonio Carlos Jobim, Carole King, James Taylor, Burt Bacharach, and George Gershwin, almost wearing out his parents' recording of "Rhapsody in Blue." After college, Schubert played piano full time in the D.C. area and later in Philadelphia. To make ends meet, he worked as a waiter at D.C.'s Capitol Hill Hyatt Regency Hotel. In the afternoons, Schubert would head to the hotel's piano bar where he'd play. One of the hotel managers heard him and asked him to play for some visiting executives, which lead to a full piano-playing job in the hotel's lounge. He began sending out song demo tapes and received kudos from Alan & Marilyn Bergman and Henry Mancini. In 1996, Schubert self-produced his first album, Dream of the Princess. Two tunes from the album were written for talk show host and author Barbara De Angelis. The album came to the attention of San Rafael, CA, record label Gallery Records. In November 1998, Life in the Moment was issued. The CD was partially recorded at Chick Corea's Mad Hatter Studios, where Schubert loves to play the studio's nine-foot Steinway piano. Highlights of CD are "Eye of the Storm," "The Courtship," "Looking Back," "To Bernice," "The Spirit in Me," and "The Wedding." Schubert practices on a refurbished six-foot mahogany 1926 Steinway Grand piano and takes songwriting and composition classes at U.C.L.A.