Janis Bass’s life in music began as a happy accident in the second grade when her family moved into a house in which previous owners had left behind a piano. It was love at first sight. She majored in Creative Arts/Music in college and gave her first full length piano performance in a concert hall as part of her BA degree from Antioch University.
To pay for her degree, she worked as a popular music performer through the Associated Booking Corporation of Chicago at venues in Wisconsin, Illinois and Ohio. She won a scholarship to do postgraduate studies at Yale University, where she stayed for two years. She studied harmony and counterpoint with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and on scholarship at the Amercian Academy of Music at Fontainebleau, and she attended Master Classes in Piano with Artur Rubenstein and Clifford Curzon.
Before founding the Janis Bass Concert Salon in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 1980, Janis also worked as a music specialist at the Ittleson Center for Child Research, Riverdale, NY; a vocal music teacher in the NYC Public Schools; and a private piano teacher.
The creation of the Janis Bass Concert Salon came from her desire to create a community of people who can enjoy live classical music together. Through the innovation of the “dropover”, the JBCS creates an informal way of presenting the classical music repertoire at the "drop of a hat". She enjoys sharing classical music both with people who have never experienced it before as well as with those who are seeking to enlarge and extend what they have already experienced.
