Born on November 2, 1956 in Roxboro, North Carolina, Frank Kimbrough was a post-bop jazz pianist best known as a longtime member of the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra. His first musical steps came when he would pick out church hymns on the piano at the age of three. He trained to be a classical pianist but discovered jazz music in his teens via watching a performance by the Bill Evans Trio. He dropped out of college and began his professional music career in Chapel Hill, North Carolina before moving to Washington, D.C. and then finally settling in New York City in 1981. Four years later, he won the Great American Jazz Piano Competition and landed a solo residency at the Village Corner in New York. He began releasing albums in the late 1980s including Lonely Woman (1988). He met bassist Ben Allison and began collaborating with him in the Herbie Nichols Project in 1991, finally earning critical accolades and a slightly larger commercial profile. He joined the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra in 1993, which increased his popularity. Kimbrough recorded eight albums with Schneider’s band between 1996 and 2020 as well as their 2015 single “Sue (or in a Season of Crime)” with David Bowie. He also released several albums as a leader including Chant (1997), The Willow (2000), Play (2005), and Monk’s Dreams: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Sphere Monk (2018). He also collaborated with other artists including Paul Motion, Joe Locke, Ted Nash, and Kendra Shank. In between his live and recording engagements, he was a music educator, teaching piano in the 1990s before becoming a professor at the Juilliard School in 2008. Frank Kimbrough died on December 30, 2020 of a suspected heart attack.
