CD of Jack Parton AKA Dirk Caber's Piano Music!

Most of you know I'm a musician by day, notably a composer, arranger, orchestrator... and that I play tuba. Most of you know that I play piano, but its been true that many of my own compositions somewhat exceeded my skills at the keyboard. In the past several years I've tried to convince friends with extraordinary piano skills to record these compositions for me, but despite their interest in my music, schedules and timing have never worked out. Now, however, thanks to a few years of COVID quarantine in company with the pianos I grew up with, I've had the luxury of sufficient practice to negotiate my own writing, and it is with some excitement that I've booked a recording studio containing a very fine Steinway piano this coming June. Add a bit of time for audio editing and actual manufacture, and by mid-summer there will be a CD of my own solo piano music, performed by ME.

I'm planning to record all the short works, some of which some of you have heard me play at the Classic-Meets-Fetish concerts in Berlin or in recitals in San Francisco and New York City. This would include the twelve Bagatelles, the twelve Morceaux, and the twelve Études*. I'll round the recording out with the Sonata finished in 2016, a work at least two of my pianist friends have looked at and said "That's a monster!" It's music I'm fiercely proud of, and thrilled to find myself able to perform.

It is not easy for a composer to get a first hearing of any of their music in the first place. This is complicated these days when the industry seems to always be looking for the next prodigy, the next Mozart or Midori, and there's a notion that a fifty-odd-year-old composer who's only enjoyed very limited note... well, there must be a reason, no? The historical fact, though, is that most composers achieve note as composers in their mid-to-late-fifties; up until that time they were recognized as pianists, violinists, conductors, chemists, civil servants, drunkards... and that generally when their music did eventually find its way into public notice, it was because either they performed it themselves or somehow produced the performance themselves. Hence, I'm right on schedule and on the right trajectory! I just need a bit of help to make it this last push, to practice, and hence to make as polished and pleasing a recording as possible. Indeed, success with this project should mean so much towards finally resuming the music career I'd trained and positioned myself for, but which for the last decade or so has been just tantalizingly slipping just out of reach.

I'd like to think I would need to produce 300 CD's. Production of a CD with case and booklet at that quantity will cost about $2/CD. Average postage should run $3 (and possibly more if recipients are outside the USA). If 250 of you contribute $25 each, this $5000 goal is achieved. Please consider donating $25, and make this recording possible. In advance, THANK YOU!

Without this assistance, I'll be simply compelled to pursue more mundane sources of income, and all this gain and progress to date towards this end is possibly merely postponed indefinitely and more probably simply lost. Again. The arts have always been a patronage-based discipline; indeed, this is still absolutely true today. Please, as my patrons, consider donating $25 (and truly, any generosity, greater or smaller, is going to be hugely appreciated!) to make this recording possible. In advance, THANK YOU!

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*The twelve Études were written for and dedicated to the top-tier donors to that previous GoFundMe campaign. For those exceedingly generous patrons I'm considering this recording a further completion of my promise extended then. As production nears completion I'll reach out to them and confirm addresses. Just in case I haven't been effusive enough in these past years, to them I have to reiterate my gratitude. If that campaign had been any less successful, •this• project would most likely never have been possible even to conceive. THANK YOU.