Paul Hecht

Paul J. Hecht is a pianist and composer whose music ranges from the center of the jazz tradition to its most adventurous edges—straight-ahead one moment, free or atmospheric the next. Initially self-taught, he fell for jazz in high school and went on to study at in Amherst, MA with Yusef Lateef. A parallel love of literature took him to Cornell, where he earned a joint PhD/MFA in poetry and trained as a classical violinist, later performing with chamber ensembles and orchestra.

Settling in Chicago as an English professor, Hecht fell in with the city's fertile creative-music scene—collaborating with pianist-composer Rob Clearfield and befriending members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, for whom he helped arrange a performance by Claire Chase at Gidon Kremer's Lockenhaus Festival in Austria. In 2020 he left academia to devote himself fully to performance and composition.

His debut album, Pyrography (ears&eyes Records, 2025), led a quartet of trumpeter James Davis, bassist Ben Dillinger, and drummer Gustavo Cortiñas, and the follow-up, Pyrography II (ears&eyes, 2026) expands the group with alto saxophonist Michael Hudson-Casanova. Hecht divides his time between Chicago and Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

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