Jazz Pianist Noah Baerman & Friends

Jazz pianist and composer Noah Baerman dedicates an evening to the music of one of his (and jazz music’s) biggest heroes, Wayne Shorter (1933-2023).

On this night join Noah and his quartet, featuring Matt Steckler (woodwinds), Amanda Monaco (guitar), Henry Lugo (bass), and Ryan Sands (drums).

Noah Baerman is a jazz pianist, composer, educator, and activist who has recorded eleven acclaimed albums under his own name and several more as a co-leader of cooperative ensembles including Trio 149, Envisage Collective, and Playdate, earning praise from. Over fifteen years after nearly walking away from the piano due to his struggles with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), an incurable connective tissue disorder with which he was born, Noah recently released his eleventh recording under his own name, the duo album Alter Ego, documenting 20 years of collaboration with bassist Henry Lugo. This came on the heels of the double-album Love Right, a tribute to his friend and former student Claire Randall that involved the participation of 100 musicians.

A student of Kenny Barron’s while earning Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Jazz Studies from Rutgers University in the 1990s, Baerman first earned national recognition for his 2003 release Patch Kit, conceived around his struggles with EDS and featuring jazz legends Ron Carter and Ben Riley. Patch Kit raised awareness and funds for EDS and led to an invitation from Marian McPartland to be a guest on her long-running NPR program Piano Jazz in 2005. Subsequent works have included Soul Force, a tribute to the life and message of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Know Thyself, an emotionally sweeping 65 minute suite made possible by a “New Jazz Works” grant from Chamber Music America/Doris Duke Foundation. Baerman’s recent CDs have received coverage from publications including Downbeat, Jazz Times, Jazziz, the NYC Jazz Record, WNPR's Jazz Corridor, the Village Voice, and the Hartford Courant, as well as an hour-long examination of his album The Rock and the Redemption on WNPR’s Colin McEnroe Show.

Since 1998 he has lived with his wife, visual artist Kate Ten Eyck, in Middletown, Connecticut, where July 10, 2020 was declared “Noah Baerman Day” by the city’s mayor and the Middletown Commission on the Arts in recognition of his a 2020 Arts Advocacy award. He teaches at several institutions including Wesleyan University, where he has directed the Jazz Ensemble since 2007, and has taught through their Graduate Liberal Studies Program since 2002, as well as spending eighteen summers working with teenaged musicians through the Center for Creative Youth. His teaching concepts have been codified through ten well-regarded instructional books published by the Alfred Publishing Company. In 2012 he became Artistic Director of Resonant Motion, Inc., an organization that seeks to explore and deepen connections between music and positive changes.

Through RMI he has overseen numerous educational workshops on the methodology behind socially conscious art, founded the musically diverse imprint RMI Records, and fostered and participated in interdisciplinary work. Since 2015 he has curated and hosted RMI’s interactive guest artist series, Jazz Up Close, and he been one of the primary architects of RMI’s initiative, Claire’s Continuum a commissioning program in the memory of Claire Randall, one of RMI’s charter team members. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic he was awarded an Artists Respond grant from the CT Office of the Arts and he recently completed the multi-year Musician-Aid Requests project, for which he recorded forty videos, many of them with socially distanced collaborators, of songs requested by fans who donated to support musicians financially impacted by the pandemic.

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