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NINE WINDS DISCOGRAPHY:
NWCD0145 Big World - Angels
NWCD0248 Rick Helzer - Face In The Mirror
NWCD0224 Rick Helzer + Vinny Golia - Fancy Meeting You Here
piano, composerIn his position as Associate Director of Jazz Studies, Rick Helzer is the author of the undergraduate and graduate jazz theory and composition curriculums along with being the coordinator of the jazz combo program at San Diego State University.
Rick has performed extensively over the last twenty-five years in a number of jazz groups. Notably he performed with the trio Big World, touring Germany and the Pacific Northwest, and recording Devotion (Cexton Records) and Angels (9 Winds Records). Both albums received critical acclaim in Jazz Times, Cadence, Coda, Saxophone Journal and numerous other publications. Jazz Times reviewer Doug Ramsey said of Devotion, "This is one of the most stimulating debut records in years." In Saxophone Journal reviewer Tim Price said of Angels, "Their artistic greatness is the likes of which you need to hear. This is essential music played by a world class ensemble." He is also featured as a soloist, composer and arranger on sixteen other albums, many of which have been reviewed in the above publications.
His most recent recordings include Face in the Mirror, a CD of his compositions featuring flutist James Newton and saxophonist Kim Richmond and Fancy Meeting You Here, an album of duets with woodwind artist and composer, Vinny Golia. Both were released in November of 2004 on the 9Winds label.Rick is a prolific composer who has written nearly three hundred compositions, many of which have been published via recordings and print media. He has written a number of commissioned works as well. In 1996 he wrote Spherical Connotations (Variations on Themes of Thelonious Monk) for colleagues Marian Liebowitz and Karen Follingstad. The piece was performed during a South American tour in April under the auspices of the United States Information Agency and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts 1997 Artistic Ambassador Program, and received many favorable reviews. More recent commissions include Saxophone Quartet No. 1, a new major work for the Spectrum Saxophone Quartet that had its international premiere at the Festival Internacional de Música y Musicología Ensenada, Baja California in October of 2002. Rick was commissioned to arrange one of his compositions, With Us, With You, for orchestra and jazz piano trio for the 9th Annual Jazz in the Pines Festival in Idyllwild, California in 2003. Along with that, he has been asked to contribute a new piece for the 2005 11th Annual Jazz in the Pines Festival Orchestra. He is currently composing a brass quintet for the critically acclaimed Westwind Brass and a piano trio.
Since August of 1999 Rick has regularly shared his expertise in jazz music with the readers of Jazz Improv magazine, an internationally distributed quarterly periodical, by contributing improvised solo transcriptions and annotations, incisive record reviews, book reviews and most recently a new ongoing column on various aspects of jazz piano called Jazz Piano Perspectives.
In the scholarly arena, He co-authored an article, Jazz Listening Activities: Children's Literature and Authentic Music Samples that was published in the October 2002 issue of the Music Educators National Convention Journal. More recently he authored an article on jazz composition in the 2004 May/June issue of the Jazz Education Journal entitled Cultivating the Art of Jazz Composition.
In June of 2002, Rick did a highly successful performance tour of Costa Rica with the faculty/student jazz trio, "Jazz Express," that garnered jazz critic Alberto Zúñiga's praise in his review published in Costa Rica's La Nación in which he stated Rick, "revealed himself to be a first class performer, owner of a personal expression and knowing how to speak the language of the great legends of jazz..." In June of 2003, he took "Jazz Express" on a twelve-day tour of Bolivia that included six performances and seven master classes in four cities.
