Results for "piano"

Pinetop Perkins

Born: July 7, 1913

Pinetop Perkins was one of the last great Mississippi bluesmen still performing. He began playing blues around 1927 and is widely regarded as one of the best blues pianists. He created a style of playing that has influenced three generations of piano players and will continue to be the yardstick by which great blues pianists are measured. Born Willie Perkins, in Belzoni, MS, in 1913, Pinetop started out playing guitar and piano at house parties and honky- tonks but dropped the guitar in the 1940s after sustaining a serious injury in his left arm. Perkins worked primarily in the Mississippi Delta throughout the thirties and forties, spending three years with Sonny Boy Williamson on the King Biscuit Time radio show on KFFA, Helena, Arkansas

Danilo Pérez

Born: December 29, 1966

Grammy award winner Danilo Pérez is among the most influential and dynamic musicians of our time. In just over a decade, his distinctive blend of Pan-American jazz (covering the music of the Americas, folkloric and world music) has attracted critical acclaim and loyal audiences. Danilo’s abundant talents and joyous enthusiasm make his concerts both memorable and inspiring. Whether leading his own ensembles or touring with renowned jazz masters ({{m: Wayne Shorter = 4301}}, {{m: Roy Haynes = 7521}}, {{m: Steve Lacy = 8532}}), Danilo is making a decidedly fresh imprint on contemporary music, guided, as always, by his love for jazz. He has led his own groups since the early ‘90s, and as bandleader has earned three Grammy® nominations for his ebullient and innovative recordings

Carl Perkins

Born: August 16, 1928

Not the rockabilly guitarist/vocalist - rather, the exceptional but little-known West Coast pianist. Carl Perkins was born in Indianapolis, IN in 1928 and eventually settled in Los Angeles in the late 1940s where he passed away in 1958, at the age of only 29. He was a classic hard bop pianist whose original technique and conception were dictated by a crippled left arm. Despite this handicap and a very short career,Perkins played with Tiny Bradshaw and Big Jay McNeely, before he relocated to the West Coast. He was with Oscar Moore's trio (1953-1954) and with the Max Roach-Clifford Brown Quintet (1954), but is acknowledged for his recordings with Curtis Counce (1956-1958). Perkins made a host of exceptional recordings with most of the major West Coast artists besides Counce, including Chet Baker, Art Pepper, Harold Land and Dexter Gordon to name just a few

Bernard Peiffer

Born: October 23, 1922

Bernard Peiffer was born on October 23, 1922 in Epinal, in the Vosges district of northeastern France. Bernard’s father, formerly an army man, was a violinist and was devoted to chamber music. An uncle, Georges Peiffer, was a composer and church organist. Bernard began his music study at the age of nine; he studied piano and harmony privately with Pierre Maire (a student of Nadia Boulanger) and dazzled older students with his ability to play back extended sections of classical pieces by ear. He continued his studies through his teens at Ecole Normale de Paris, the Marseille Conservatory, and the Paris Conservatory, where he won the coveted and revered First Prize in Piano

Duke Pearson

Born: August 17, 1932

Duke Pearson was an American jazz pianist and composer. All Music Guide notes him as being a "big part in shaping the Blue Note label's hard bop direction in the 1960s as a producer. Born Columbus Calvin Pearson, Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia, Pearson first studied brass instruments at the early age of five, but dental issues forced him to pursue another instrument and he started to learn the piano. His budding talent moved his uncle to give him the nickname Duke, a reference to jazz legend Duke Ellington. He attended Clack College while also playing trumpet in groups in the Atlanta area before joining the United States Army in the early 1950s. Pearson continued to perform with different ensembles in Georgia and Florida, including with Tab Smith and Little Willie John, before he moved to New York, New York in January of 1959

Dave Peck

A native of the Pacific Northwest, Dave Peck is recognized as an outstanding composer, arranger and pianist. He is known for his introspective style and rich harmonic coloring and has been described as “…a formidable musical voice, lyrical and insightful” and “…an absolute artist with a unique command of his instrument and the language of music”. Downbeat magazine says Peck’s playing is “lyrical and pastel, swinging and bluesy, with a ringing crystalline touch.” and Cadence Magazine says he “…can hang with the currently feted crop of young lions”.

Dave has appeared on Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland

Hermeto Pascoal

Born: June 22, 1936

Hermeto Pascoal is a prolific musician and composer whotranscends category. Hermeto often uses unconventionalinstruments such as teapots, children's toys, found objects,and—sometimes, without harming them—live animals. Heuses nature as a basis for his compositions, as in hisMúsica da Lagoa, where the musicians burblewater and play flutes while immersed in a lagoon. He is anenergetic and virtuosic soloist who can play proficiently onalmost any instrument: keyboards, button accordion,saxophone, guitar, flute, voice, various brass instruments,and various folkloric instruments. A Brazilian televisionbroadcast from 1999 showed him soloing at one point bysinging into a cup with his mouth partially submerged inwater.

Avery Parrish

Born: January 24, 1917

There are many mysterious characters in jazz and blues history whose names are remembered or recognized on the records down below the artist in parenthesis, as the composer of the song. Avery Parrish will go done in history as the composer of the classic blues piano song “After Hours.” Parrish attended Alabama State Teachers College where he became a member of the 'Bama Street Collegians in 1934, which in time became the Erskine Hawkins Big Band. Parrish was with Hawkins through the glory years, staying until 1941 and appearing on all of the band's early recordings. The Erskine Hawkins Big Band, which, while not as popular as many other big bands of the era, were a very able and functioning working band that has one detail that no other band from that time has: they created the classic standard “After Hours.” Avery Parrish played piano and arranged the song in 1940 for label Bluebird

Horace Parlan

Born: January 19, 1931

Horace Parlan has overcome physical disability and thrived as a pianist despite it. His right hand was partially crippled by polio in his childhood, but Parlan's made frenetic, highly rhythmic right hand phrases part of his characteristic style, contrasting them with striking left-hand chords. He's also infused blues and R&B influences into his style, playing in a stark, sometimes somber fashion. Parlan has always cited Ahmad Jamal and Bud Powell as prime influences.

He began playing in R&B bands during the '50s, joining Charles Mingus' group from 1957 to 1959 following a move from Pittsburgh to New York. Mingus aided his career enormously, both through his recordings and his influence. Parlan played with Booker Ervin in 1960 and 1961, then in the Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis-Johnny Griffin quintet in 1962. Parlan played with Rahsaan Roland Kirk from 1963 to 1966, and had a strong series of Blue Note recordings in the '60s.

Eddie Palmieri

Born: December 15, 1936

Known as one of the finest pianists of the past 60 years, Eddie Palmieri is a bandleader, arranger and composer of salsa and Latin jazz. His playing skillfully fuses the rhythm of his Puerto Rican heritage with the complexity of his jazz influences: Thelonious Monk, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner as well as his older brother, Charlie Palmieri.

Palmieri’s parents emigrated from Ponce, Puerto Rico to New York City in 1926. Born in Spanish Harlem and raised in the Bronx, Palmieri learned to play the piano at an early age, and at 13, he joined his uncle’s orchestra, playing timbales.