Show Description
Singer/pianist/composer Gabriel Kahane and jazz pianist Dan Tepfer have individually been turning heads of audiences and critics with their virtuosity and musical inventiveness. For this concert, they are joining forces to explore the nature of songwriting and musical style and make improvisation accessible through the explicit juxtaposition of theme and variation: Gabriel will play a set of his songs solo, and then Dan and his trio will play the exact same set, reinterpreted, to give both artists and audience a unique take on composition and performance."Kahane makes it work … his characteristic style of wistful lyrics and sophisticated chord progressions. Clever wordplay was wedded to sophisticated, elusive compositions, capped by melodies that lingered. After the set, I bought a copy of Walking Away from Winter, and listened to it three times straight through on the subway ride home." - Steve Smith
Gabriel Kahane is a boy who dropped out of high school and then graduated from an Ivy League institution. But he is neither pompous nor foolish. At least not at the same time. It's precisely this kind of mixed metaphor that drives Gabriel's artistic life: witness his most recent work wherein he's set ribald postings from craigslist.org to chromatic, harmonically dense, and rhythmically jagged music in the song cycle, Craigslistlieder. It would be a mistake, however, to pin Gabriel as a gimmicky guy. For while he writes cheeky pop confections about the renovations at his local supermarket and the emasculating effect that American Apparel stores can have on a man, he's perhaps most gifted at (and most interested in) offering direct emotional experiences through introspective ballads.
Critics have called New York-based pianist/composer Dan Tepfer "brilliant" (Boston Globe), "one of tomorrow's jazz stars" (Eugene Weekly) and "certainly among those clearly willing to play with familiar formulas and take new approaches, even as he incorporates strokes from the masters" (Jazzreview.com). Born in Paris in 1982 to American parents, he started classical piano studies at the age of six, and immediately began to explore improvisation. In college, he majored in astrophysics before switching to jazz piano for his master's at the New England Conservatory in Boston. He tours internationally as leader of his trio and has released a debut CD, Before the Storm, which was voted one of the ten best albums of 2005 by Cadence Magazine. Most recently, he was awarded both the first prize and the audience prize at the Montreux Jazz Festival Solo Piano Competition. Dan has performed with Steve Lacy, Dave Holland, Chris Potter, Bob Brookmeyer and Christian McBride, and has studied with Martial Solal, Fred Hersch, Kenny Werner, Danilo Pérez and Bob Brookmeyer.
