Eric Vaughn

During pianist-composer Eric Vaughn's more than four decades in jazz, Vaughn has played with some of the genre’s leading lights. He has performed up and down the West Coast (from Vancouver, British Columbia, to the San Francisco Bay Area), in Europe, and in North Africa. But his own music, in which he fuses elements of Thelonious Monk, Art Tatum, McCoy Tyner, and others to forge a distinctively personal approach he describes as “hard bop to modern-esque,” has largely fallen under the jazz radar screen—a situation sure to be rectified with the release this summer of Minor Relocation, his first nationally distributed recording.