FM
Biography
Denny Zeitlin (10 April 1938, Chicago, Illinois) is an American jazz pianist and composer, and a clinical professor of psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco. He has recorded more than 30 albums, including more than 100 original compositions, and was a first place winner of the Down Beat International Jazz Critics Poll in 1965 and 1974.
Zeitlin grew up in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park. He began improvising on the piano at age two and was composing before elementary school. His father was a radiologist who played piano by ear. His mother was a speech pathologist and his first piano teacher. He began formal study in Western classical music at age six, switching to jazz in the eighth grade. In high school, he played professionally in and around Chicago[1], and by college at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was playing with Ira Sullivan, Johnny Griffin, Wes Montgomery, Joe Farrell, Wilbur Ware, and Bob Cranshaw, among others. Mentors included pianist Billy Taylor and George Russell, while pianist Bill Evans, an early supporter, frequently recorded Zeitlin's composition "Quiet Now" and made it the title track of a 1970 album.[2][3]
