Althea Waites

Althea Waites (born 1939) is an American concert pianist. She has performed across the United States and internationally. She is currently a faculty member at California State University, Long Beach.

Biography Waites was born in 1939 in New Orleans, Louisiana, to a musical family; her father and grandfather played the piano, and her mother sang in the church choir. She began studying piano at age five. She also studied with Russell Sherman at the New England Conservatory. where she was artist-in-residence. For more than 20 years, she has taught at California State University, Long Beach.

Waites has said that she has been on a "crusade" to perform music by Black women composers. She was the first pianist to make a recording of Price's music. A review in the academic journal The Black Perspective in Music highlighted the album's significance as a record of an important figure (Price) in American music history.

In 1993, she released the album Black Diamonds, on which she performed works by African-American composers, including Price, William Grant Still, Margaret Bonds, and Ed Bland. Her Grammy-nominated 2023 album, Reflections in Time, continues her project of (in her words) "mainstreaming" new music and the music of composers of color, presenting world-premiere recordings of music by Margaret Bonds, Jeremy Siskind, and Curt Cacioppo along with three of the "Three-Fours" of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Critical reception A 1980 review in The San Bernardino County Sun described Waites as a "good technician" and "an excellent performer" who "projects a sense of informality, of conversing with her listeners intimately with her music." For a 1986 performance of Florence Price's Sonata in E Minor, the Los Angeles Times praised her "technical assurance and probing artistry."

The American Music Guide highlighted her performance of Price's music on her 1993 album, Black Diamonds, observing that she plays "with great respect and dignity, making the listener aware of the quality of the music and its expressive content."

Selected recordings

Althea Waites Performs the Piano Music of Florence Price (1987), Cambria Records. Black Diamonds: Althea Waites Plays Music by African-American Composers (1993), Cambria Master Recordings. "Along The Western Shore (1997) "Celebration" (Music of American Composers) 2012