Piano | b. 1938

Denny Zeitlin started playing piano at two, was performing professionally in Chicago while still in high school, studied composition with George Russell among others, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Illinois in 1960, and was completing his medical degree at Johns Hopkins when John Hammond signed him to Columbia Records. He did not want the contract. Hammond was persuasive. "Cathexis" (Columbia, 1964), "Carnival" (1964) and "Live at the Trident" (1965) all appeared before he received his MD, establishing him as a pianist of unusual harmonic and compositional seriousness. Cue Magazine in 1965 placed him among the most inventive jazz pianists of his generation. He won DownBeat's International Jazz Critics Poll in 1965 and 1974. After graduating, he joined the clinical faculty at the University of California, San Francisco as a professor of psychiatry and continued performing in the Bay Area, where a mid-1960s trio with bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Jerry Granelli produced the avant-garde-leaning "Zeitgeist" (Columbia, 1967). He subsequently withdrew from performing for a period, experimented with electronics and prepared piano, and re-emerged in the 1970s before composing the entirely electronic soundtrack to Philip Kaufman's 1978 "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." He has continued to record and teach, and remains active at 88.