Where should I start…these stories, my music, it comes from all the places I’ve been, the people I’ve been blessed to play music along side, the way it feels to play my guitar until it bleeds or to bang on that old piano in my living room until my shoulders ache and my fingers won’t move anymore. From Georgia to New York, New York to the road; Charleston and Memphis, Vermont to Chicago. Turned 21...
Robert Glasper was raised in Houston, Texas. His mother was his first and strongest musical influence. Mrs. Glasper not only played piano and sang gospel music in the family's church, she led a band that worked the city's jazz and blues club circuit as well. By the age of twelve, young Robert was playing piano in that church. "Gospel music is built on emotion and spirituality; you go to church and leave crying," he smiles. "It definitely just gave me that sensitivity and knowing how to reach people and knowing how to be in tune with your feelings and the emotion of the music.
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninov (Russian: Сергей Васильевич Рахманинов, Sergej Vasil’evič Rakhmaninov, 1 April 1873 [O.S. 20 March] – 28 March 1943) was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. He was one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, the last great representative of Russian late Romanticism in classical music. Early influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and other Russian composers gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom which included a pronounced lyricism, expressive breadth, structural ingenuity and a tonal palette of rich, distinctive orchestral colors.[1]
Ever since his first temper tantrum, Bo knew he wanted to perform. After an awkward “athletic” phase, he started dedicating his time to school theater. He continued to nurture his love for performance, receiving rave reviews from countless relatives. Bo chose to attend an all-boys catholic high school, thus giving his nickname “theater queer” some additional validity. During the fall of his junior year in high school, Bo started teaching himself how to play piano and guitar.
Anthony Pateras (b.1979) is a multidisciplinary musician living and working in Melbourne, Australia. Solo, he appears on piano or analogue electronics, and composes written works for ensembles, orchestras and soloists. His main bands are Pateras/Baxter/Brown freeform acoustic noise-jazz, an electro-acoustic duo with Robin Fox, the free-grind project PIVIXKI (with Max Kohane) and noise sculptors POLETOPRA (with Marco Fusinato).
Sophie Hutchings is Australian pianist and composer. Having begun playing piano young growing up in a musical family, Sophie started writing properly in her teens. Sophie’s compositions move from disarmingly spare and elegant beginnings to curl out with a tingling edge, propelling its austerity into urgent and epic realms. Violin, cello, drums, percussion and organ heighten the flight these pieces can take as well as dip and swell within the more dimly lit moods of gentler nuance, casting a particular spell across the range of feeling captured in Sophie’s playing.
Steven Osborne is one of Britain's most highly regarded pianists. He was born in Scotland in 1971 and studied with Richard Beauchamp at St Mary's Music School in Edinburgh and with Renna Kellaway at the Royal Northern College of Music In Manchester. In 1988 he was a finalist in the piano section of the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition, and went on to win first prize in the prestigious Clara Haskil Competition in 1991 and the Naumburg International Competition in New York in May 1997.
Sara Beth Bareilles (born December 7, 1979) is a Grammy-nominated American singer-songwriter and pianist. Bareilles was born and raised in Eureka, California, United States. After graduating from UCLA in 2002, Bareilles performed at local bars and clubs. She issued two demos of mostly live tracks in 2003: The First One in April and The Summer Sessions in October. In January 2004, Bareilles released her first studio album, Careful Confessions.