Collection: Denny Zeitlin

Denny Zeitlin grew up in Chicago, started playing piano at two, requested formal lessons at seven, and was performing professionally in and around the city while still in high school. He studied composition with Alexander Tcherepnin, Robert Muczynski and George Russell, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Illinois in 1960, and was in his final year at Johns Hopkins Medical School when John Hammond heard him play and signed him to Columbia Records. Zeitlin did not want a recording contract. He was going to be a psychiatrist and had a degree to finish. Hammond was persuasive enough that "Cathexis" (1964), "Carnival" (1964) and "Live at the Trident" (1965) all appeared before he completed his MD, three albums that established him as one of the most harmonically sophisticated and compositionally original jazz pianists of the decade. Cue Magazine in 1965 described him in terms that would have been unusual for any pianist, let alone one simultaneously finishing medical school. He won DownBeat's International Jazz Critics Poll in 1965 and 1974. After graduating, he relocated to San Francisco, where he joined the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco as a clinical professor of psychiatry and continued performing; a mid-1960s trio included Charlie Haden on bass and Jerry Granelli on drums. His 1967 Avant-garde date "Zeitgeist" with Haden and Granelli pushed further out than the Hammond-produced albums. He subsequently withdrew from public performance to develop his music further, experimented with electronics and prepared piano, then re-emerged in the 1970s and eventually composed the soundtrack to Philip Kaufman's 1978 "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," an entirely electronic score that won him a different kind of audience. He has continued recording and teaching, remaining active at 88.