About Me
Music means a great many things to a great many people. Baby boomers started their lives with “The Twist†and came into full adulthood with the rhythms of the Motown sound and disco. Meanwhile. most Generation X’ers and beyond have never picked in their life picked up an instrument, much less played one.So while Brianne Ford may be young, she definitely doesn’t fall into the latter category. Born and raised in the home of Jazz, the great American city of New Orleans, Brianne began her obsession with the piano at the age of seven. Along with her professional lessons, she also played for her church. Sundays, weekdays, special events…Brianne exceeded her teacher’s expectations with feverish play of the holiest of holy tunes.However, during her down time something else seized her attention: the radio. Now a young girl blossoming into a teenager, she finally discovered jazz on local radio stations like WWOZ. This was a momentous shift in her development as Brianne realized her destiny: to become a jazz piano player.By her mid-teens, Brianne started hanging out in New Orleans jazz clubs. It was there that she attained a true vision of the passion of jazz music. But she gained focus with her education at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (N.O.C.C.A.), a specialized high school for gifted teenage artists whose alumni include both Wynton and Branford Marsalis and actor Anthony Mackie, to name a few.It was at NOCCA that Brianne met a major influence in her life, teacher Clyde Kerr, Jr. He would teach her fundamentals like theory, performance, small ensemble, as well as a healthy dose of how the real world will treat a rookie musician. Meanwhile, Brianne would finally get her first professional gig at the age of 15 and would continue playing a few nights a week throughout her high school years. A scholarship award from Blue Note Records would help continue her crucial studies at a special summer jazz intensive at Skidmore College.All of this early, steadfast education would be a major influence in Brianne’s future.In college, she studied under the tutelages of jazz legend Ellis Marsalis, the late James Williams - a highly noted sideman for Art Blakely and the Jazz Messengers, Harold Mabern - who played with Lee Morgan, and composer/soloist/pianist Peter Martin.These four heavies imparted Brianne with the skills and discipline to hold her own when she secured piano playing gigs in New Orleans, all along the East Coast and beyond. But even more so, their influence, combined with the lessons from her early education teachers, imbued Brianne with the knowledge of not only what a jazz pianist is, but what it could be.Filled with all this wisdom, Brianne’s passion is to now educate young musicians on the fundamentals of music. Her training allows her the skill and patience to turn their raw potential into true talent.She continues to challenge herself and her students, both in private lessons and as a teacher in the Newark, NJ school system, by combining traditional and electronic “ambient sound†elements in her piano performances, recordings and compositions. Brianne understands that by not allowing her students to simply play standards but to teach them to accept music as sentient and ever-evolving, that she can make it grow past being perceived as boring and transform it to the point where they can not only enjoy it, but see it grow into something even better than we all can even realize.
