Renee Rosnes

Like Danilo Perez, Brad Mehldau and any number of other up and coming jazz pianists, Canadian raised piano player and composer Renee Rosnes keeps challenging herself and pushing herself and her band in new directions.







As a young pianist in Vancouver, B.C., Rosnes took her musical cues and inspiration from people like Oscar Peterson, McCoy Tyner and Horace Silver. She began playing classical piano at age 3 and got bitten by the jazz bug in high school, after a high school music teacher recruited her for the jazz band. She attended the University of Toronto for two years to study classical performance, but left to go back home to Vancouver and begin playing jazz full time because she knew where her heart lied and what she wanted to do professionally. The early 1980's jazz club scene in Vancouver, B.C. was a vibrant, healthy one, and she had the opportunity to sit in with and learn from many American and Canadian jazz masters, among them Sarah Vaughan, Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald and Toshiko Akiyoshi. At an after hours jazz club, she sat in with the likes of Freddie Hubbard, Wynton and Branford Marsalis and Woody Shaw.

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