Greg Spero (born February 22, 1985) is an American pianist from Highland Park, Illinois. He has toured with Halsey and the Miles Electric Band and has composed music for film and television. [1] He leads the jazz band Spirit Fingers. [2] He also runs a label called Tiny Room, [3] which runs live streamed sessions from its studio in Los Angeles and has been featured on NPR Live Sessions. [4] When the coronavirus pandemic caused live music to cease in 2020, he launched a startup called weeBID which is the first fan initiated crowd funding platform. [5] Spero was described as "a new breed Of record exec, at vanguard of big changes in music industry". [6] He outlined his vision for weeBID at the Center for Creative Entrepreneurship, Chicago in August 2021. [7]
Spero's mother was a classical pianist and his father was a blues pianist. When he was fourteen, he joined his father's band. He also worked with Frank Catalano, Buddy Rich, and Robert Irving III. [8] Spero became a devotee of Nichiren Daishonin's Buddhism through Herbie Hancock, [9] whom he met at the Ravinia Festival.
In 2009, he launched a jazz piano masterclass channel on YouTube called weeklypiano. [10]
His album Radio Over Miles (2010) is a combination of Miles Davis and rock band Radiohead. The album was nominated for Best Jazz Album at the Chicago Music Awards. Spero's album Live in Toronto is "sold" at a karmic price; the download is available for free in exchange for karma. "Purchasers" have to check a box agreeing to complete four karmic transactions to include giving "five random smiles to people on the street, regardless of age, sex, or looks." His album Acoustic (2011) is in a piano trio setting.
In 2014, Spero began performing with pop artist Halsey. Between 2014 and his leave in 2018, Spero designed and performed all the synthesizer and keyboard parts for her live shows, at such venues as Madison Square Garden, Allstate Arena, and The Forum. [11] Spero and Halsey also performed on such late night TV shows as Jimmy Kimmel Live! , The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon , The Today Show , and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert . On January 19, 2018, Spero performed live on Saturday Night Live with Halsey. That day, he announced that he would be leaving the group to pursue his band Spirit Fingers full time, along with curating a video series called Tiny Room out of his Los Angeles studio. [8]
In 2015, while on tour with Halsey, Spero began composing for his new project which would eventually be named Spirit Fingers. [12] Spero accrued musicians Hadrien Feraud, Mike Mitchell, and Dario Chiazzolino to join the group. They recorded their debut record on Shanachie Records, released on March 16, 2018, and reached number 11 on the iTunes Jazz chart and number 20 on the Billboard Contemporary Jazz chart. [13]
Although he has composed and performed jazz, his interest in other styles afforded him opportunities to record with Ski Beatz, Shock G, [14] and American rapper Murs. Spero has also written songs with Darryl Jones. He composed music for the Feltre Theater performances of Eugène Ionesco's Exit the King , two Tennessee Williams one-act plays, and for the film The Perfect Breakup.
He has performed with Arturo Sandoval, Corey Wilkes, and co-produced tracks with Ski Beatz (of Jay Z) and Shock G. [14]
In 2020, he founded a startup company called Weebid, which is a crowdfunded marketplace for artists to interact with their fans. [15]
Ronald Shannon Jackson was an American jazz drummer from Fort Worth, Texas. A pioneer of avant-garde jazz, free funk, and jazz fusion, he appeared on over 50 albums as a bandleader, sideman, arranger, and producer. Jackson and bassist Sirone are the only musicians to have performed and recorded with the three prime shapers of free jazz: pianist Cecil Taylor, and saxophonists Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler.
Dave Douglas is an American jazz trumpeter, composer, and educator. His career includes more than fifty recordings as a leader and more than 500 published compositions. His ensembles include the Dave Douglas Quintet; Sound Prints, a quintet co-led with saxophonist Joe Lovano; Uplift, a sextet with bassist Bill Laswell; Present Joys with pianist Uri Caine and Andrew Cyrille; High Risk, an electronic ensemble with Shigeto, Jonathan Aaron, and Ian Chang; and Engage, a sextet with Jeff Parker, Tomeka Reid, Anna Webber, Nick Dunston, and Kate Gentile.
Rashied Ali, born Robert Patterson, was an American free jazz and avant-garde drummer who was best known for performing with John Coltrane in the last years of Coltrane's life.
Freddie Redd was an American hard-bop pianist and composer. He is best known for writing music to accompany The Connection (1959), a play by Jack Gelber. According to Peter Watrous, writing in The New York Times: "Mr. Redd hung out at jam sessions in the 1950s and played with many of the major figures, Sonny Rollins to Art Blakey, and worked regularly with Charles Mingus. When things got tough, he just moved on, living in Guadalajara, Mexico, and in Paris and London."
Joseph Salvatore Lovano is an American jazz saxophonist, alto clarinetist, flautist, and drummer. He has earned a Grammy Award and several mentions on Down Beat magazine's critics' and readers' polls. His wife, with whom he records and performs, is singer Judi Silvano. Lovano was a longtime member of drummer Paul Motian‘s trio with guitarist Bill Frisell.
Stephen Paul Motian was an American jazz drummer, percussionist, and composer. He played an important role in freeing jazz drummers from strict time-keeping duties.
Jonathan Denis Langford is a Welsh musician and artist based in Chicago, Illinois, United States.
Lemon Demon is a musical project and band created by American comedian and musician Neil Cicierega in 2003 in Boston, Massachusetts. Lemon Demon's studio work is performed solely by Cicierega, who is the project's sole official member. Live performances also include a backing band, with previous performances consisting of Alora Lanzillotta, Charles Sergio, Anthony Wry, Dave Kitsberg, and Greg Lanzillotta. As of 2024, Lemon Demon has released seven studio albums and five EPs.
Barry Doyle Harris was an American jazz pianist, bandleader, composer, arranger, and educator. He was an exponent of the bebop style. Influenced by Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, Harris in turn influenced and mentored bebop musicians including Donald Byrd, Paul Chambers, Curtis Fuller, Joe Henderson, Charles McPherson, and Michael Weiss.
Steven Bookvich known as Muruga Booker is an American drummer, composer, inventor, artist, recording artist, and an autonomous Eastern Orthodox priest.
Thomas Lee Flanagan was an American jazz pianist and composer. He grew up in Detroit, initially influenced by such pianists as Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, and Nat King Cole, and then by bebop musicians. Within months of moving to New York in 1956, he had recorded with Miles Davis and on Sonny Rollins' album Saxophone Colossus. Recordings under various leaders, including Giant Steps of John Coltrane, continued well into 1962, when he became vocalist Ella Fitzgerald's full-time accompanist. He worked with Fitzgerald for three years until 1965, and then in 1968 returned to be her pianist and musical director, this time for a decade.
Robert Andre Glasper is an American pianist, record producer, songwriter, and musical arranger. His music embodies numerous musical genres, primarily centered around jazz. Glasper has won five Grammy Awards from 11 nominations.
Eric Robert Lewis, popularly known as ELEW, is an American jazz pianist who has found cross-over success playing rock and pop music. He is known for his unconventional and physical playing style, which eschews a piano bench and includes reaching inside the piano lid to pull at the strings directly, as well as the creation that he calls "Rockjazz", a genre that "takes the improvisational aspect of jazz and 'threads it through the eye of the needle of rock.'"
Gregory Allen Kurstin is an American record producer, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter. He has won nine Grammy Awards, including Producer of the Year, Non-Classical in 2017 and 2018, and contributed to four songs which peaked atop the Billboard Hot 100.
Sam Newsome is an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and educator. His music combines straight-ahead jazz, world music and experimental jazz, which uses extended techniques. Newsome is an associate professor of music and the coordinator of the music program at Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus.
Brandee Younger is an American harpist. Younger infuses classical, jazz, soul, and funk influences to the harp tradition pioneered by her predecessors and idols Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane. Younger leads her own ensemble, performs as a soloist and has worked as a sideman for such musicians as Pharoah Sanders, Jack DeJohnette, Charlie Haden, Bill Lee and Reggie Workman, and other popular artists including Lauryn Hill, John Legend, Common, Ryan Leslie, Drake, Maxwell, The Roots, Moses Sumney and Salaam Remi. Younger is noted for her work with saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, who was featured on her 2019 release, Soul Awakening. She recorded and toured with drummer and producer Makaya McCraven following the release of his 2018 album Universal Beings.
Dario Chiazzolino is a guitarist, composer, arranger, producer, and award-winning artist based in New York City. He has played with Bob Mintzer, Billy Cobham, and the Yellowjackets.
Shabaka Hutchings is a British jazz musician, composer and bandleader. He leads the band Shabaka and the Ancestors, and used to lead Sons of Kemet before its dissolution in 2022. He was also a member of The Comet Is Coming, performing under the stage name King Shabaka. Hutchings has played saxophone and other wind instruments with the Sun Ra Arkestra, Andre 3000, Floating Points, Mulatu Astatke, Polar Bear, Melt Yourself Down, Heliocentrics, London Brew and Zed-U.
Makaya McCraven is an American jazz drummer and bandleader.
This is a timeline documenting events of jazz in the year 2022.