Results for "piano"

Roberto Domeniconi

Pianist, compositions for small and large ensembles, improvised music, contemporary

Yaron Herman

Born: July 12, 1981

Yaron Herman was born on 12th July 1981 in Tel Aviv. He started out on a promising career as a basketball player on the Israeli national junior team but that was cut short by a serious knee injury which quashed his sporting ambitions. He only decided to take up playing the piano, at the age of 16. His teacher was the renowned Opher Brayer, famous for his methods based on philosophy, mathematics and psychology. Yaron was soon giving his first performances in the most prestigious concert halls in Israel. At 16, Yaron left for Boston where he planned to enroll at the Berklee College School of Music

Roger Friedman

Born: July 29, 1954

After a stint at Ohio University playing the conga drums in the Jazz ensemble, I transferred to Berklee in Boston. That's where I met some really great musician's and started to see where my place was in music. One of my close friends at Berklee, Steve McCraven, was studying drums. He heard me play both the piano and the drums and said "forget the drums, stick to piano", and that's what I did. I studied piano with Ray Santisi and formed an electric jazz-fusion group in Boston. We moved to western Massachusetts and made some incredible music for a couple of years. Very spontaneous, highly improvisational

Enoch Smith Jr.

Born: November 24, 1978

Many, maybe even most, great artists have benefited from a single-minded devotion to their work. But for veteran pianist Enoch Smith Jr., jazz is but one of the life endeavors that define him, which explains why his terrific new album, The Book of Enoch, Vol. 1, is his first in eight years. 

Once an aspiring lawyer, he worked as an aide to New Jersey Assemblywoman Elease Evans from 2009 to 2011. In recent years, he has dedicated a large chunk of time in his current residence of Allentown, New Jersey to learning and teaching Brazilian jiu-jitsu (with a special eye to underprivileged kids). And as Director of Music and Worship, he leads the Jazz Vespers program at the Allentown Presbyterian Church.
“To be honest, I hadn’t really missed recording,” he says. But after he performed various hymns at the APC [Allentown Presbyterian Church] with bassist Kai Gibson and drummer David Hardy having taken a deep dive into the music’s history and the people who wrote it, the time was right to return to the studio. “The guys were, like, this is really great,” he says. “We should record this. Even the patrons at the services were, like, are you going to do anything with this? This is some really great music. So that's what led to recording it.
“I felt like this music was something that wasn’t being represented in a big way on the scene. We had played it a lot, so when we went into the studio, we recorded it as one set. We played the entire set through one time, a second time, and then that was it, you know?”
Featuring rearranged and reimagined songs, The Book of Enoch, Vol. 1 follows a series of varied, gospel-influenced jazz albums by Smith (all released on his own Misfitme label). But Smith has never immersed himself as deeply in religious music, or as swingingly in jazz, as he does here with his trio—a format he enjoys for the freedom it gives him. 
The album opens with a jaunting treatment of the timeless “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.” Says Smith, “When I hear that song, it’s hard to not think about Mahalia Jackson. With this arrangement, I was trying to capture the feeling that I felt when I heard her performing this version of it, where she deviates from the melody.”
Another traditional tune, “Holy City,” draws from John’s description of heaven in the Bible, which Smith captures through his plaintive but brightly uplifting playing. 
Though he first heard contemporary gospel great Andrae Crouch’s “Soon and Very Soon” at funerals when he was a boy, the song filled him with joy. That’s reflected in his sparkling version here. Kenneth Morris’s “Christ Is All” was one of the first hymns he learned to read (from a hymnal) and play. “It was very cool to be able to bring it back and arrange it all these years later.”
The popular a cappella group Take Six’s rendering of Ralph Carmichael’s “A Quiet Place” was his introduction to the hymn. “I sang it in an a cappella group as a younger kid in middle school. I didn’t have any notions of being a musician or anything like that. It was just a song that I loved.” The same can be said of “Amazing Grace,” which Smith adapts to stirring effect on his original tune, “Gracefully.” “It kind of gives me this energy of how do we approach our challenges?” he says. “How do we travel through difficult spaces? How do we respond to adversity? And the answer is gracefully.”
“Mitch’s Moves,” the bluesy final “chapter” in The Book of Enoch, Vol. 1, was written by the protean Philadelphia pianist, composer, and producer Parris Bowens. “That song is really to shed light on just how far across the musical universe the influence of jazz and gospel have spread,” says Smith. “You know, here’s a guy who would never be considered a jazz musician at all in any jazz circles. But when you listen to him playing, you’re like, man, he has definitely been influenced by this music in addition to being another guy who grew up playing in the church.
“Unfortunately, we’ll never know what the rest of his story would have been. [Bowens died tragically at 40, during the Covid pandemic.] But it’s kind of my tribute to his great musicianship and the way he inspired a whole generation of young gospel musicians.”
Enoch Smith Jr. was born on November 24, 1978, in Rochester, New York. Following in the footsteps of his father, who had sung in a gospel quartet, he began singing in the children’s choir of his Pentecostal church when he was three. He played trumpet in middle school and drums in church and sang in the concert choir. At 14, he began teaching himself how to play piano. Even though he couldn’t read music, playing by ear, he became the church’s substitute pianist. 
“Choir was my homeroom,” he says. “I spent my lunch periods there sitting at the piano and plucking things out and figuring things out.”
While attending Berklee, he started to look for paying church gigs. Only when he auditioned at Baptist churches did he discover how big the Christian religion was. “I didn’t know many Baptists growing up,” he says. “I was amazed to find out that they wrote their songs down in hymnals and all their songs were in books. I grew up in a church that didn’t have hymnals. I didn’t know what it was.”
 
He initially planned on going to law school, having interned at Rochester law firms while in high school, and “maybe playing basketball.” Syracuse University was his first choice. His high school teacher and choir director convinced Enoch to think about attending music school and arranged an audition for him at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. During a class field trip there, while the rest of the choir was off doing the sights, Smith did his audition. “They accepted me on the spot,” he says. But fitting in proved difficult. 

Mike Wolk

Born: February 26, 1953

About Us:

Performing music that swings, sounds cool, with great harmony and melody is my life's work. I prefer the structure of straight- ahead jazz as it gives me a chance to play the lines, phrases and licks that create an emotional response from my band members and the audience.

As bandleader, I keep us working, organized and write most of the arrangements and original material we use in our performances. We generally work as a trio up to a sextet and played every Saturday night at our “home base” at Mistral on Market Street for many years. We now perform at a great variety of locations across the southeast. Many of our members are working full time as musicians.

Tom McDermott

New Orleans is a city with a rich musical heritage, and Tom McDermott is a pianist who has mastered many of its styles. Born in St. Louis in 1957, McDermott began piano lessons at age six. After eight years of lessons, he got caught up in the Scott Joplin revival and began playing and composing rags and early jazz pieces. This eventually led, in 1981, to an album of original ragtime music on the Stomp Off label, New Rags. McDermott received a scholarship to St. Louis University and graduated in December 1978 with a B.A. in Art. Shortly after that he began his career as a free-lance journalist, writing mainly about music for a number of St

Tony Foster

UPDATE! Seattle-based pianist and composer Tony Foster has released a new trio recording in June of 2016. The recording is entitled "Project Paradiso: Tony Foster Plays Ennio Morricone and Henry Mancini" and features Foster's arranging of 9 Morricone and Mancini compositions along with one of his own originals entitled "Mr. Mancini." This project is an exploration of the music of great film composers and no better place than to start with 2 iconic composers Ennio Morricone and Henry Mancini! The recording features Canadian drummer Joe Poole and Seattle bassist Nate Parker. Some well-known classics like "Theme From The Pink Panther" and "Love Theme from Cinema Paradiso" are on the recording, but so are some less- known but powerful melodies which Foster artfully arranged for his trio! May 2009 marked the release of jazz pianist and composer Tony Foster's debut trio recording entitled "In Between Moods"

Tony Tixier

Born: February 26, 1986

Tony Tixier was born in 1986 in Montreuil, France. At the young age of 6, he started studying classical piano at the conservatory. One year later, he made his first stage appearance. He studied choral, classical harmony and counterpoint, as well as writing and composition. He graduated Honors DFE in Musical Training (12 years) and DFE in Classical Piano with Pascal Gallet (14 years). In 2009, Tony produced his first album, Parallel Worlds, which consisted of a septet with bold orchestral writing that defines itself as a laboratory of sounds and climates, perfectly illustrating his clear interest in orchestration and musical research

Miguel Sacristan

Born: July 23, 1961

Miguel Sacristan Muñoz Professor of Piano and Composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Madrid.He has studied with Agustin Serrano, Luis de Pablo, Claudio Abbado, Nicanor Zabaleta and Padre Sopeña,Chair and Professor of Fine Arts, among others. His father Miguel Sacristan Ramos, Chair of Direction and Composition at the Conservatory, has been his mentor. With a broad professional career, after  conducting the Pequeño Teatro de La Zarzuela in Madrid and various symphonic formations, he focuses on record and television production. He has been part of classical groups of Spanish pop like Pekeniques

Adam Shulman

Born: August 1, 1979

Adam Shulman has been a staple of the San Francisco Jazz scene since he moved to the city in 2002. Before the move, Adam was a student at UC Santa Cruz where he received a degree in classical performance. While at UCSC he studied jazz piano with Smith Dobson.

Adam can also be seen as a sideman with countless bay area musicians and vocalists such as, Marcus Shelby, Anton Schwartz, Andrew Speight, Erik Jekabson, Ed Reed, Mike Olmos, Gary Brown, Patrick Wolff, John Wiitala, Vince Lateano, Faye Carol, Kellye Gray, Ian Carey, and Mike Zilber among many others.

Adam has played as a sideman with internationally renowned artists Stefon Harris, Willie Jones III, Dayna Stephens, Miguel Zenon, Mark Murphy, Alan Harris, Luciana Souza, Paula West, Larry Coryell, Sean Jones, Grant Stewart, John Clayton, Bobby Hutcherson, Bria Skonberg and with the Glenn Miller Orchestra.