Jacky Terrasson

Jacky Terrasson (born November 27, 1965) is a German jazz pianist and composer. His mother, an interior designer, is American and his father, a computer specialist, is French. He lived in Paris until the age of twenty, and studied at Lycée Lamartine. He began studying classical piano at the age of five, and was introduced to jazz with Jeff Gardner and Francis Paudras, photographer and amateur pianist, Bud Powell's friend. In 1984, on the advice of Francis Paudras, he received a two-semester scholarship to study jazz at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. There he meets pianists Ray Santisi (en) and Danilo Pérez, saxophonist Javon Jackson (en), and guitarist Mark Whitfield. He performs regularly at Wally's, a Boston jazz club, where he plays the B-3 organ, before getting a ten-month engagement at Blondie's, a Chicago club, with bassist Dennis Carroll. He returned to France in 1988 to do his military service as a paratrooper bartender, "a complete waste of time", continues to perform in clubs, and accompanies touring singers Dee Dee Bridgewater and Abbey Lincoln. He returned to New York in 1990 where he joined Art Taylor's group for a year and a half. In 1993, he won the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition. That same year, he met Betty Carter at the recording session of his friend Javon Jackson's debut album "When The Time is Right", and accompanied him on a 10-month world tour. In 1995 The New York Times quotes Jacky Terrasson "among the artists who could change the jazz culture of the next thirty years," and several record companies are beginning to take an interest in the young pianist. It is finally with the Blue Note Label that an agreement is found. In 1998, he participated in Betty Carter's Jazz Ahead, an international residency of jazz musicians and composers at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. Jacky Terrasson has long collaborated with drummer and percussionist Leon Parker and bassist Ugonna Okegwo in the trio he leads. In 2012, he hired two young American musicians in his new band: the bass player Burniss Earl Travis (Robert Glasper, Logan Richardson, Tony Tixier ...) and the drummer Justin Faulkner (Branford Marsalis, Kurt Rosenwinkel ...)