LP Giobbi is finally coming home to play. The electronic music producer- DJ-keyboardist is a one-woman jam band who often mixes ecstatic dance beats with old-school rock or classic jazz instrumentation—offering something for everyone on the dance floor. She toured the globe last year-- but has never performed in her hometown of Eugene, until now.
“My birth name is Leah Chisholm," she said. "My artist name is LP Giobbi. The Giobbi is my mother’s maiden name, so it was my way of reclaiming the matriarch when I picked my artist name.”
LP Giobbi is first and foremost a pianist. On a recent TikTok post over an image of her playing the keyboards before an adoring throng, she wrote the words, “This is why I took piano lessons for 14 years.”
“I always say that I won the lottery twice,” Giobbi said. “The first time, I got to be born to my parents and then the second time when my parents found me my piano teacher that I studied with from second grade all the way through graduating. Caroline Horn in Eugene, Oregon, one of the most remarkable teachers of all time. And I learned classical piano then ventured into jazz piano and went to school at UC Berkeley to study jazz piano performance.”
LP Giobbi started dabbling in Dance Music (DM) production in 2018.
“I really got into producing because I learned that only 2% of producers are women and that was wild to me,” she said. “And so, I just sort of became dead set on, you know, trying to change that number and that statistic.”
LP Giobbi has since founded Femme House--a non-profit that teaches women how to produce music.
The 35-year old has played high-profile festivals like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza and she’s amassed over 100 million streams across digital platforms. With just her keyboard and a USB stick, LP Giobbi has ping ponged across the globe, touring 16 countries in 2022.
She starts riffing off locations: “Canada, the U.S., Mexico, Turks and Caicos, Bahamas, Argentina, Chili, the UK, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Croatia, Australia, New Zealand… The list goes on—it’s been a wild year for sure.”
She calls herself a “house musician,” and let’s just say some of the “houses” LP Giobbi plays are large. Like the O2 Arena in London where she played a grand piano accompanied by the London Orchestra as vocalist UltraNaté performed her signature song, “Free.”
“Pete Tong did this introduction for me when I came on stage and he had everybody turn on the light of their camera-- so there were 17,000 lights facing the stage,” Giobbi recalled.
“And as I walked on stage, I could see my mom and dad in the front row. The spotlights just happened to hit their faces as I was walking on and I got to catch their eye and share this moment with them and it was just magic.”
LP Giobbi said she’s a “Dead Head raised by Dead Heads.”
Parents Gayle and Mike Chisholm have provided their daughter with an arsenal of Grateful Dead t-shirts, so she always has one to wear on stage.
Recently, LP Giobbi received the rights from Trixie Garcia and Redlight Management to remix some of Jerry Garcia’s tunes.
“When the Garcia camp reached out to me about, you know, it’s going to be the 50th anniversary of his first solo record, “Garcia,” so they wanted to know if I wanted to take my own spin on it,” she said.
With the separated musical parts- or stems- from each Garcia track—LP Giobbi took to her studio.
“Jerry’s voice is—he’s like a member of our family. It’s so deeply important to roots of who I am,” she explained. “I was quite nervous about it like ‘oh, I don’t want to mess this up.’ And what I came to realize is—I’m never going to make a record that’s better. I’m not even going to come close to touching the original. It was just sort of my way of trying to bring my community into the beautiful music that is the Dead and is Jerry Garcia.”
LP Giobbi just wrapped a gig with Dead and Company-- Playing in the Sand, in Cancun, Mexico. Her next stop is Eugene. She’ll play her Dead House set as a hometown debut at The Big Dirty this Saturday night (January 21, 2023, which is also her dad's 70th birthday!)
