Some pretty sweet news about Jenni's music

Holy moly Will and I have posted like 4 or 5 blogs this week alone! But we just have a lot going on right now, so bear with us. Pretty soon we'll be boring again and you won't have to read a bunch of blogs for a while - haha.

So I just wanted to share some positive news about my music. Usually I just post my music updates on my MySpace page, but since this bit of news is very premature, I don't exactly want to put it up on MySpace yet. So I'm just sharing with our close friends and family here that we blog with. =)

Have you ever heard this thing called the Grammy Awards?

Well, earlier this year my album was reviewed by a woman named Kathy Parsons, who is a very-well known editor for Solo Piano Publications. (Basically if you get a review by her, then she ups your chances of people taking notice of your album, as she posts her reviews on Amazon, Cdbaby, etc.) Anyway back to the story here. She reviewed my album and gave it a wonderful review with the highest recommendation, which I was extremely excited about.

Last week I got an email from Kathy telling me that she had just got off the phone with Grammy nominated artist Michael Hoppe, who is on the Grammy Awards committee for the New Age category. He asked her if she could recommend one cd from the last year for the Grammy Awards, and she said my album came to her mind right off.

Okay, and as you can imagine I'm sitting there at my computer reading this email with the hugest eyes and biggest pounding heart ever, thinking "Okay....AND...??"

To make a long story short, she told me the deadline was only a week away (Sept 5th), and if I hadn't done so already - to hurry and submit it.

Well there are all sorts of jumps and hoops involved as well though. Even to submit an album you must be a member of the Grammy Organization, which honestly was on my list of things to do this year but I just had never gotten around to doing it. Plus you have to pay an annual membership fee of $100, which...well that was a big reason why I kept putting it off. I was like, "Okay unless I actually have a reason to join this year I'm not forking out the hundred bucks." So I had to hurry and do that the other night.

Well and then there's the issue that you can't even submit an entrance until your application for membership has been reviewed and approved - so I was out of luck there (holiday weekend and all, and the deadline is 6pm on Wednesday).

But after 2 days of playing phonetag with Michael Hoppe, we finally got to speak today about the entire matter. With a very strong English accent, I hear on the other end of the phone, "Jennifer, your album is absolutely outstanding, perfect technique, wonderful song selection, engineering, the packaging is wonderful too - your photographs, etc.. This is the kind of album we truly want listeners to be aware of. I'm absolutely serious - it's the type of talent that the world needs to know about."

I'm standing there on the other end of the phone, nervously pacing in the living room. Hello I'm talking to Michael Hoppe. I've owned his CDs since college - he was my study music!! And always one of my favorite artists! And he is telling me that he loves my music??

"I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm flying to LA at the end of the month, as I'm one of 5 members of the New Age Category Screening process and we are meeting for 2 days to screen all of the entrants for the Grammy Awards. I'm going to take your album down with me and submit it to the committee. In the meantime, you need to FedEx a copy to this person in LA, I'll give you her address, and you tell her I told you to do it and ask her to please deliver it to the appropriate person." Michael continues on.

So that's basically it. Now before you all get too excited, please please PLEASE know that this is just the first phase in a very long nomination process. Michael is only taking my album to the screening room. And even there, he says there is a good chance my album won't meet the requirements for the New Age Category and might need to go to the Classical Category - which I really hope not, because then I would be up competing against artists like Yo-Y0 Ma. Gulp.

Once they do this initial screening process, I get notifed as to which category it was finally sent to - either New Age or Classical. And then in December, all 18,000 members of the Grammy Organization (including myself) vote on nominations. There can only be 5 nominations per category. These 5 nominated artists (from my genre) then go to the Grammy Awards in February 2008.

I was forewarned that making it as part of the nominated 5 probably would not happen unless I already had a huge following, or wrote the music for a blockbuster film this year or something of that calliber. Not to mention it's a huge popularity contest. But towards the end of this phone conversation with Mr. Hoppe, he said, "But the reason I want you to enter is because your music truly deserves it, and it will get your name out there, nomination or not."

He then invited Will and I to meet him and his wife the next time we are in Portland and then we said goodbye.

So that is the something cool I just wanted to tell you all. Wish me luck!
Jenni