Conservatory trained musician, Joanne Jolee, began studying piano, music theory, and voice at age eight and composing music beginning at age twelve. Jolee has been tapped to write music for radio, television, and video soundtrack productions.

"In the '80s and '90s I was busy home schooling my children and teaching private piano lessons to many families from the home schooling community. With one parent home full time to teach, their budgets were limited and often they would send the oldest child for lessons who would then take the lesson home and teach the younger siblings what they had learned.  This gave me the idea to write, The Progressive Pianist, distributed throughout the US and Canada since 1998, a comprehensive method that enables parents without any musical background to teach piano to their children. Your Time To Play, new for 2012, springboards off this proven program and offers the same to adults who have always dreamed of playing the piano but either quit lessons as children, or have been too busy with family and career to pursue their musical interests." Your Time to Play, is a step by step piano program that uses music as the way to bring empowerment and change to your life. Studies show that relaxing by actively playing music, as opposed to passive activities such as watching television, produce a biological response to stress that goes all the way to the DNA level. Heart rate, blood pressure and respiration rates are reduced and HGH levels are increased which helps to reverse aging and promote youthfulness and vitality. Jolee, mother of five and grandmother of four knows that perhaps the most important contributing factor to great health and long life is to be happy - and playing music is simply a happy joyful experience.

As a core subject alongside reading and mathematics, Joanne believes music has been a key component in the academic success of all five of her children. The older four have bachelor degrees with various careers and higher education pursuits including a daughter in law school, another  pursuing her psychology doctorate, and son, now a professional golfer.  The youngest is full time in college maintaining a 4.0 GPA. "Years ago I spoke with Professor Gordon Shaw from the University of California, Irvine, regarding the link he discovered between music and spatial temporal reasoning. The media picked up on his research and dubbed it, "The Mozart Effect", recognizing that early music training has a direct link to academic achievement in children. Today, studies show the enormous benefits of daily music making to the physical, mental and emotional health of adults, with only a small investment of leisure time. And of course, playing the piano is an activity that you can start at any age and improve on, all through your senior years!

Recreate with Music and Re-Create Yourself

Your Time To Play includes anecdotes, stories and songs from Jolee’s own experiences.  "Life is just like music—you get started, you practice, you progress, you deal with plateaus, and you find ways to overcome difficulties. Music has always been a strong source of inspiration and that comforting safe place to express myself." says Jolee. Verses from Joanne’s uplifting original songs are integrated into the series and can be found on her CD, “The Definitive Collection”, a compilation of the best compositions of her career including arrangements on the works of Beethoven, Shelly, Longfellow and La Folia. "Performing music is an honor and nothing gives me more delight than to touch and raise the spirit of another  person with my songs."  In the ‘80s Joanne toured with the band that included original ‘Turtles" band member, Jim Tucker (“So Happy Together”). In 1998 she formed a classical crossover band with three of her daughters and in 2002 the band won the title, Arizona’s Best Pop Band.