(VIRTUAL) Conversation with Noah Baerman

Please join us for a conversation with Noah Baerman. The conversation will be streamed on Facebook, where you will be able to ask Noah questions. The stream is available here: https://www.facebook.com/yalejazzcollective/live/.

Noah is a jazz pianist, composer, educator, author, and activist. 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 will soon release his eleventh recording under his own name, the double-album Love Right. A student of Kenny Barron’s while earning Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Jazz Studies from Rutgers University in the 1990s, he 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, the Village Voice, the NYC Jazz Record, and the Hartford Courant, as well as an hour-long examination of The Rock and the Redemption on WNPR’s Colin McEnroe Show, and he has released two additional albums in the past two years with cooperative ensembles he co-leads, Trio 149 and Envisage Collective.

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 arts commission in recognition of his earning 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 and worked with teenaged musicians through the Center for Creative Youth since 2002. 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 architects of RMI’s newest initiative, Claire’s Continuum a commissioning program in the memory of his friend and collaborator Claire Randall, one of RMI’s charter team members.