2018-02-09
7:30PM
n/a
"I first saw Emily at the Stuttgart Jazz Festival, in 2015. I was totally knocked out. Wow! She is an immensely talented young artist, with a long and successful career ahead her."
- David Sanborn
Emily Bear
At age 16, Pianist/Composer/Arranger Emily Bear enjoys composing, orchestrating, and performing in a diverse collection of styles. She has performed at many of the worlds' most well known venues including Carnegie Hall, the White House, Lincoln Center, Montreux Jazz Festival, Blue Note, Ravinia, and the Hollywood Bowl, among others. Her concerts have taken her to concert halls across the U. S. and Europe. Her love for all musical styles ranges from classical to jazz, and everything in between.
At 6 years of age, Emily received the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award. She has continued to be a prolific composer and premiered several new orchestral works this year that she composed and orchestrated to critical acclaim. She established herself as a classical artist performing Mozart's Piano Concerto, no. 23 K488 at the age of 7, followed by the Schumann Piano Concerto in A minor and most recently, Rhapsody In Blue by Gershwin, which she performed with several orchestras this fall across the U.S. and Canada. Her love for jazz has taken her from the famous hall of the Montreux Jazz Festival to Blue Note Tokyo, Dizzy's at Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Blue Note in NYC - where she recently premiered original music she composed for Big Band Jazz Orchestra.
Emily also loves composing for film and TV. Emily has released 6 CD's of original music, with her most recent CD, Diversity, produced by Quincy Jones for Concord Music. "She's the most delightful human being I've ever met in my life," Quincy says. "And her music is the same way. I am at once astounded and inspired by the enormous talent that Emily embodies. With the ability to seamlessly move from Classical to Jazz and Be-bop, she shows as much musical prowess as pianists/composers twice her age, and I am thrilled to be working with her. She's astounding, man ... she's astounding. She plays like she's 40 years old. She is the complete 360-degree package, and there are no limits to the musical heights she can reach."
Emily has been composing since she was 3 years old and has 5 original sheet music songbooks distributed worldwide. Each of her CD's and songbooks dedicates a portion of sales to various charities. A documentary on Emily has attracted more than 26 million views on YouTube and has recently won an Emmy Award. She was recently interviewed for NPR Radio by David Green that was selected for a CD collection of NPR's top stories: People We Meet: Unforgettable Conversations.
An ASCAP member since age 5, Emily's teachers include Mary Sauer, principal pianist for the Chicago Symphony; Veda Kaplinsky, Head of the Piano Department at Juilliard; Ron Sadoff head of NYU Steinhardt for film scoring; and Frank Kimbrough, of Juilliard Jazz program for jazz piano. Emily and her family live in Illinois where in her free time, she loves to bake, wakeboard, volunteer at local animal shelters and make jewelry.
