Award-Winning Pianist-Composer Daniel Szabo Debuts New Music at Blue Whale

Pianist-composer Daniel Szabo debuts a stunning set of new music in his Fuzzy Music album pre-release concert at Blue Whale, Friday, November 9 at 9:00pm.

Tickets: $20 / $15 for students Blue Whale 123 Astronaut Ellison S. Onizuka Street, 3rd Floor

This music foreshadows a future in which boundaries are less important than connections, where integration wins over isolation, and community prevails over individualism ...

The full ensemble includes Sara Andon, Kim Richmond, Katisse Buckingham, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Michael Valerio, Daniel Szabo, Peter Erskine, Sara Parkins, Ben Powell, Charlie Tyler, Chris Bleth, John Yoakum,Phil O'Connor, and Chad Smith. Conducted by Timothy Williams

The ASCAP Foundation and the Symphonic Jazz Orchestra have announced Daniel Szabo as the recipient of the 4th Annual ASCAP Foundation/Symphonic Jazz Orchestra Commissioning Prize.

This prize was created to honor the memory of the trailblazing musician George Duke, who was the SJO Co- Music Director and an ASCAP board member. The SJO Music Advisory Board was tasked with the job of screening the submissions from across the country, ranging from leading jazz veterans to promising young composers. This year's winner, Daniel Szabo, will write a new symphonic work for the ensemble's 2019-20 season.

Daniel Szabo is an LA-based performer-composer who has recorded & produced eight albums as a leader. He's also worked on a great number of recordings as a collaborator with such artists as Peter Erskine, Patrick Williams, Bob Sheppard, Jimmy Haslip, Kim Richmond, Chris Potter, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Lionel Loueke and John Zorn. He has toured worldwide and won multiple awards, including the Grand Prize of the City of Paris at the International Martial Solal Jazz Piano Competition as well as the Montreux Jazz Piano Solo Contest in Switzerland. He regularly performs at major venues both in the US and Europe; his trio was featured in the "Mellon Jazz Up"-series, hosted by Danilo Perez in 2008, at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia where he shared the stage with Lang Lang and the Wayne Shorter Quartet.

His upcoming album, recorded in April of 2018 at The Bridge Studio in Glendale, California, was written for a unique instrumentation combining woodwind sextet with string quartet and jazz rhythm section. In "Visionary," Szabo features an outstanding line-up of musicians and such as Sara Andon, Bob Sheppard, Kim Richmond, Edwin Livingston and Peter Erskine. Szabo composed, arranged and orchestrated all of the pieces and played the piano. The pieces were conducted by Timothy Williams.
Szabo also composes music for theater, dance and film.

Szabo is an Adjunct Associate Professor at UCLA's Herb Alpert School of Music. He earned his Doctorate degree at the University of Southern California, in the fields of jazz piano, film scoring, classical composition, and music theory, after being trained at the New England Conservatory and the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest.