Jazz musician, IU faculty member prepares for summer tour abroad, Christmas album

It’s Christmas in May for music professor and local jazz artist Monika Herzig. \nShe will be recording a Christmas album for the first time. \n“It feels kind of weird, because obviously you have to record it in the summer to get it ready,” she said. “So I’ll be in the studio in May and June playing Christmas songs, but I think everybody needs their Christmas albums.”\nAs a songwriter and trained piano player, Herzig will perform in Bloomington and other parts of Indiana before heading off to her home country, Germany, in July and then Rome for a festival organized by The International Adkins Chiti Foundation: Women in Music Foundation, in November. Herzig will play solo piano performances, duos with her husband, as well as work on her Monika Herzig Acoustic Project, throughout the summer.\n“It’s kind of the umbrella name for the thing I’m doing right now, meaning it’s not the electric style of jazz that I used to do ... it’s more the traditional type of jazz, more acoustically based and using the standard repertoire,” Herzig said of her project, “And it can be anything from just a basic piano trio, three people, up to four or five with a horn or violin or so.”\nWFIU radio host David Brent Johnson said that Herzig has been a wonderful activist for jazz in south-central Indiana and also a great advocate of women in jazz.\n“I’ve always been impressed by Monika’s incredibly active pace — she’s always teaching, performing and undertaking new projects, pretty much all at once,” Johnson said.\nAlthough Herzig said she loves jazz, she didn’t start out in the jazz arena right away. Born in Stuttgart, a city in southern Germany, in 1964, Herzig really wanted to learn how to play piano when she was young. After begging her parents to buy one, she started taking lessons and also learned how to play the church organ. \n“When you get (to become) a teenager then you want to be in the bands and just be popular,” she said. “But I realized I have to learn a different style of music, that classical music is not going to get me in any bands. So I learned how to improvise and do jazz and all that.”\nOnce Herzig started getting into jazz she explored the music of all the great jazz artists. She said she has always thought it to be an omen that she and jazz artist Chick Corea were born on the same day.\nIn 1986, Herzig joined a jazz-fusion group that started in Germany called BeebleBrox, and played the keyboard. With BeebleBrox, she got to tour with such artists as Tower of Power, Sting and Santana.\nAfter finishing her undergraduate studies in Germany, Herzig attended the University of Alabama to complete her master’s degree as part of an exchange program. \n“We kind of had planned to make this work and stay here any way, because we just bought a one-way ticket,” she said, adding that she and her “then-boyfriend, now-husband” brought all suitcases and her boyfriend’s guitar.\nAfter searching for schools to get her doctorate, Herzig chose IU for a degree in music education and jazz studies, which she completed in 1997. Now, after teaching all kinds of music classes at IU, Herzig has moved into teaching students about the music industry. She said the classes are popular and have really caught on. Since then, she has moved to the School of Public and Environmental Affairs full time as part of the undergraduate arts administration program that started last fall.\nWhen Herzig is not teaching, she is performing and recording. She released another CD for her acoustic project in early 2007, titled “What Have you Gone and Done?” featuring originals and covers ranging from John Lennon to Cole Porter. Recently in late 2007 Herzig collaborated with Indiana poet Norbert Krapf on a CD of poetry and music, titled “Imagine: Indiana in Music and Words.” Krapf was one of Herzig’s students in 2006 and since then, the two have shared a love for jazz and bonded over German. \n“I think both of us would agree that the collaboration has been good for us,” Krapf said. “Not only do we perform together, joining music and poetry. I have a conviction that music and poetry never should have been separated.But we also are inspired to write new material in response to the other’s work.”