About Me
NPR INTERVIEW with JAMIE Feb.28 (click here)
PIANO LESSONS for ADULTS / SENIORS / TEENAGERS in Richmond, VA.
Near Carytown.
Beginners to advanced. Build solid classical foundation, develop artistic expression, ergonomic technique. Play music you enjoy, with pianist/composer Jamie K. Sims.
25 years experience – mostly in NYC. Complimentary consultation.
Jamie K. Sims music has been described as utterly fetching (Village Voice) with originality and wit (The New York Times).
Sims has written works for chamber orchestra, piano solo, voice and piano, and various ensembles, with the support of the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her compositions also include music for documentaries (Gentle Woman of a Dangerous Kind: Mari Hsekawa, Peace Activist), dance (composer/choregrapher for the Cosmopolitan Dance Troop, NYC, 1977-80), Off-Broadway theater (Michael Makmans Professor Putter at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, NYC), foreign commercials, and sacred settings.
In 2001 she founded the Blue Ridge Chamber Orchestra, and in 2002 Sims published the article Music and Animals in the March edition of the VALVT (Virginia Association of Licensed Veterinary Technicians) Quarterly.
Taking a break from concert music in the early 80s, Jamie K. Sims transformed her Cosmopolitan Dance Troop into New Wave party band, the Cosmopolitans. Among songs that received international acclaim and airplay was her tongue-in-cheek hit recording, under the name the Cosmopolitans,(How to Keep Your) Husband Happy (Shake Records, NYC, Albion Records, UK). The song reached ..1 in 1980 for several weeks on the Wave Breaker national alternative radio chart. The flip side, Wild Moose Party, also recieved heavy rotation on New Yorks WNEW-FM and other stations throughout the U.S. and abroad.
Sims has served as artist-in-residence, funded by the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, for several educational institutions in Virginia: Blue Ridge Community College, Weyers Cave, VA (three semesters: spring 2001, fall 2001, spring 2002), William Fox Model Elementary School, Richmond, VA (1999 and 1998), and Green Valley Elementary School, Roanoke, VA (1998).
In 2004 one of her sacred choral works, God's Love Unbroken, (written to encourage inclusion in the religious communitites) earned a CAP grant from the American Music Center in New York.
Also a grant recipient of the Virginia Commission for the Arts, she has been awarded four Artist Study Grants, Arts Education Technical Assistance Grants, and a Special Arts-In-Education Technical Assistance Grant to attend Kennedy Center workshop, Artists As Educators.
Because of her depth and breadth of experience in the arts, and her strength as an arts advocate, Sims as been recruited for several advisory panels of the Virginia Commission for the Arts. From 1988 to 1990 she was Director of Workshops for Women In Music, Inc., New York Chapter.
Jamie K. Sims grew up in Alabama and North Carolina and received a Bachelor of Music with Honors in composition from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying under the late Roger Hannay. Sims lived and worked in New York, N.Y. for seventeen years before relocating back to the South, in 1993, to Richmond, Virginia, where she currently writes and maintains her private composition and piano studio.
Sims is a member of B.M.I., the American Music Center, and the International Alliance for Women in Music. She has published with Mooscular Phonic Tunes and has recorded for Shake Records, Albion Records, and Dionysus Records.
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