We are excited to announce that New York Australian expat and acclaimed jazz piano virtuoso and vocalist Matt Baker will be teaching at Summer Jazz Camp 2018.
No stranger to Jazz Camp, Matt Baker was a popular regular on the teaching faculty before moving to live in New York. He has since enjoyed a stellar career and has become one of Australia’s most successful international jazz musicians. He is also a passionate and skillful jazz educator who brings an irresistible enthusiasm to his teaching.
Baker recorded his 5th album Almost Blue (via JazzElm Music), with producer Matt Pierson, released in June 2016. The album features tenor saxophonist Joel Frahm, along with Luques Curtis on bass, Obed Calvaire on drums and guitarist Lage Lund. His previous album‘Underground’ featuring Gregory Hutchinson, Dayna Stephens and Jeremy Pelt received rave reviews in Downbeat, Jazz Times and Jazz Wise UK, and reached #26 on the US JazzWeekcharts.
Baker’s sideman credits include engagements with, among others, guitar icon Bucky Pizzarelli, tenor saxophonist Joel Frahm, bassist Marco Panascia, and vocalists Alexis Cole, Tierney Sutton, Judy Collins and Barb Jungr. In addition to refining his presentation of the Oscar Peterson repertoire in his show ‘An Oscar Moment’, (which has been presented at Birdland and different venues in North America and abroad with sidemen Jim Cammack, Jerome Jennings and vocalist Brianna Thomas), Baker has played numerous trio engagements that feature his own repertoire conception in diverse NYC rooms like Birdland, The Blue Note, Cleopatra’s Needle, Gin Fizz, Iridium, Kitano, Bemelmans, Le Cirque, the Zinc Bar, as well as The Side Door in CT and Scullers Jazz Club in Boston.
Matt Baker was an award winner in the 2003 Montreux International Solo Jazz Piano competition and a semi-finalist in 2004 and 2005. The Montreux Jazz Festival also engaged the Matt Baker Trio as its exclusive in-house band for 2 years straight, where they performed 17 nights in the Montreux Festival Jazz Club, accompanying and supporting many of the headlining artists.
A student of Taylor Eigsti’s since moving to New York, Matt watched Oscar Peterson perform live an entire week at the Blue Note, which he recounts as being as great a lesson as any! Baker has also studied with Mulgrew Miller, Benny Green, Fred Hersch, Aaron Goldberg, Jacky Terrasson, James Williams, Ralph Sutton and Ella Fitzgerald’s life-long accompanist Paul Smith.
