I’ve been making music for as long as I can remember — it’s always been my primary mode of expression. I grew up studying classical piano and obsessively improvising jazz at home. For most of my creative life, I’ve navigated the divide between these two worlds, though at this point my deepest roots lie in jazz and improvisation. I’ve been lucky to get to make music with some of the very best musicians in the jazz community, from Lee Konitz to Pharoah Sanders via Mark Turner and Paul Motian.
The truth, however, is that style has never felt all that important to me. I grew up bilingual, raised in France by an American family, which may explain why I’ve always been much more attached to content than to form, more concerned with what’s being said than the language in which it’s being expressed. As a result, I’ve grown increasingly drawn to exploring different means of expression for my music in order to further isolate the message from the medium. A sports analogy: if you always play tennis against the same person, you only get better at playing against that person. If you always play with different people, you get better at tennis. What I’m trying to do is clarify my message, independently of style. To get right at the music itself.
Dan Tepfer, born in Paris to American parents and based in New York City, is “a pianist of extraordinary technique and fearless harmonic sensibility” (JazzTimes). He has performed globally with leading figures across jazz and classical music, from Lee Konitz to Renée Fleming, and he has released more than a dozen albums as leader in solo, duo and trio formats. While The New York Times has recognized Tepfer as a “deeply rational improviser drawn to the unknown,” he also works as a composer for the concert hall, with his pieces including the piano quintet Solar Spiral, orchestral suite Algorithmic Transform, and Three Poems of Virginie Sampeur, a song cycle for jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant with string orchestra.
Tepfer earned international recognition with his 2011 release Goldberg Variations / Variations, which featured him performing J.S. Bach’s masterpiece as well as improvising on it, to “elegant, thoughtful and thrilling” effect (New York magazine). In 2019, he revisited his undergraduate studies in astrophysics with the video album Natural Machines, where he explored in real time the intersection of digital algorithms and the rhythms of the heart; he performed music from Natural Machines in a widely seen NPR Tiny Desk concert. Tepfer also co-created the app FarPlay, which enables users to play music with others over the internet as if they were in the same room.
Accolades for Tepfer include first prizes at the Montreux Jazz Festival Solo Piano Competition and American Piano Awards, as well as fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, MacDowell Colony and Fondation BNP-Paribas. In 2023, he returned to Bach with the album Inventions / Reinventions, which topped the Billboard Classical Charts and spurred The New York Times International Edition to declare that it’s “hard not to be swept away by Tepfer’s vision and compelling realizations.” In November 2025, the pianist made his Carnegie Hall debut as a leader, with orchestra, in Natural Machines 2.0.
"As a pianist, Mr. Tepfer combines superb technique with a complex set of impulses: He's a deeply rational improviser drawn to the unknown.” — The New York Times
One of his generation’s extraordinary talents, Dan Tepfer has earned a global reputation as a pianist-composer of wide-ranging ambition and individuality. The New York City-based musician, born in 1982 in Paris to American parents, has performed around the world with some of the leading lights in jazz and classical music, from Lee Konitz to Renée Fleming. Tepfer has also crafted a discography striking for its breadth and depth, encompassing probing solo improvisation and intimate duets, as well as jazz trio albums marked by their melodic-rhythmic verve and the leader’s keen-eared taste in songs no matter the genre. In 2011, he earned international acclaim with Goldberg Variations / Variations, an album that featured him performing J.S. Bach’s titular masterpiece as well as improvising on it in a way that the Wall Street Journal said built “a bridge across centuries and genres for a dialogue with Bach.” Tepfer has composed his own chamber works and orchestral pieces, including a song cycle for jazz vocal star Cécile McLorin Salvant with string orchestra. Forward-minded and technologically engaged, Tepfer revisited his undergraduate studies in astrophysics with the 2019 solo video album Natural Machines, where he explored in real time — via the Yamaha Disklavier — the intersection between science and art, coding and improvisation, digital algorithms and the rhythms of the heart. In November 2025, he makes his Carnegie Hall leader debut in the program of Natural Machines 2.0, with orchestra. In the words of France’s Télérama, Tepfer is truly an artist “who refuses to set himself limits.”
In 2023, Tepfer returned to the wellspring of Bach for a second, distinct project: Inventions / Reinventions, in which he took on the Baroque composer’s collection of Two- and Three-Part Inventions; in this work, Bach only addressed 15 keys out of a possible 24. For Tepfer’s album, released via Story Sound Records, he played Bach’s 15 pieces, as written, along with nine of his own free improvisations in the “missing” keys to create a 24-key, 55-minute mix of the timeless and the contemporary. Inventions / Reinventions topped the Billboard Classical Charts, and Tepfer — as he did with his Goldberg Variations project — performed the music far and wide, enchanting listeners and critics alike. The New York Times International Edition declared after witnessing a performance of Inventions / Reinventions that it’s “hard not to be swept away by Tepfer’s vision and compelling realizations.” Broadcast outlets from National Public Radio to FIP Radio France hailed the album, with the latter praising it as an “exhilarating” experience. Michael Lucke Music, in 2024, published a a book of transcriptions for Inventions / Reinventions.
An enthusiastic, synergistic collaborator, Tepfer notched a five-star review in DownBeat magazine for his “sparkling” duo album with saxophonist Miguel Zenón, Internal Melodies; released in 2023, the disc saw the pair range eclectically from pieces by Lennie Tristano and György Ligeti to originals by both players, including the pianist’s lyrically intricate title track. Among his other key musical partners, Tepfer had a long duo relationship with the late, great Lee Konitz. French piano star Martial Solal, a mentor for Tepfer, introduced the alto-sax luminary to the younger artist, and they hit it off at once, sparking a partnership that would yield duet performances on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as two albums: Duos with Lee (Sunnyside, 2009) and Decade (Verve, 2018), with the latter hailed by DownBeat for “its air of life-affirming creativity… speaking to the present rather than the past.” Tepfer has also pursued duo projects with drummer Leon Parker and multi-reed player Ben Wendel (having released the lauded Sunnyside disc Small Constructions with the latter in 2013). That’s not to mention touring in the bands of such divergent artists as saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders and the soprano Renée Fleming, as well as performing Bach concertos in tandem with classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein and working with choreographer María Muñoz.
Even with his collaborative spirit, it’s true that Tepfer has often gone especially deep solo, whether it’s with his Goldberg Variations / Variations (released by Sunnyside), the early Twelve Free Improvisations in Twelve Keys (DIZ, 2009) or the recent Natural Machines (Sunnyside for its audio release). The 11 tracks of Natural Machines include ricocheting, uptempo episodes (“Demonic March”), glowing aural sculptures (“Fractal Tree”) and affecting ballad-like pieces (“TriadSculpture”). He performed excerpts in a NPR Tiny Desk Concert, widely seen via YouTube. Writing about the creation of Natural Machines, critic Nate Chinen emphasized, on WBGO-FM/NPR, the pianist’s status as an ambitious thinker: “What’s striking about Tepfer’s algorithmic project isn’t just the whiz-bang factor, or the notion that computer coding could lead to such hyper-dynamic results. It reflects his larger preoccupation with restrictions and freedoms, the analytical and the willfully unruly.”
Discussing his evolutionary process for Natural Machines, Tepfer has said: “The Disklavier is essentially a modern player-piano — an acoustic piano with digital capabilities — but it doesn’t only have to play something that has been pre-recorded. The way I’m using it is that anything I play on the piano immediately gets sent into my computer, where I’ve written programs that send commands back to the piano for it to play – which I then react to, for a kind of live feedback loop. So, I’m not writing a piece as much as I’m writing the way the piece works. But the music isn’t pre-planned, only the rules. The piano is creating the composition with me in real time, so there’s a melding of the human and the machine there that I find really fascinating.” For a five-minute mini-doc on NPR.org about his experience with the Disklavier — which has been viewed millions times via Facebook — Tepfer said: “I’ve been playing the piano for three decades, but suddenly, this instrument that I know so well, inside and out, feels totally brand new. I’m creating music with this piano and these algorithms that, honestly, I couldn’t create in any other way. More to the point, it’s about creating an experience for me as performer that’s all about improvisation… That moment of pure discovery is so magical.”
In the context of Natural Machines, it’s notable that Tepfer is someone who was bred to blend his right brain and left brain with rare parity. To start, he took a circuitous route to his music career, first earning a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics from Scotland’s University of Edinburgh (with his thesis on “Numerical Simulations of Galactic Superwinds”). Later, during Covid pandemic, his belief that music can bring people together in times of crisis led him to dive headlong into live-streaming, performing hundreds of online concerts from home for a devoted community of listeners; this inspired Tepfer to create ultra-low-latency audio technology that would enable him to perform live through the internet with musicians in separate locations. The process led to the development of his own app, FarPlay — a visionary tool for virtual music performance, rehearsals and coaching sessions, complete with unmatched audio delay mitigation, multi-user sessions and multi-track recording capabilities.
But music-making was always in Tepfer’s blood, as his mother was an opera singer and his grandfather a jazz pianist. Tepfer began classical piano studies at age 6 at the Paris Conservatoire-Paul Dukas. He played on the jazz scene in college and even enjoyed a brief stint as an opera conductor. After graduating in 2005 from Boston’s New England Conservatory, where he completed his master’s degree in jazz piano performance under the guidance of Danilo Perez, Tepfer moved to New York and soon became an in-demand player, performing with such innovators as Steve Lacy, Paul Motian, Bob Brookmeyer, Joe Lovano, Ralph Towner, Billy Hart and Mark Turner.
Quickly evolving into a bandleader, Tepfer issued two early trio albums — Oxygen (DIZ, 2007) and Before the Storm (DIZ, 2005) — in league with bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Richie Barshay. Allying high instrumental finish to tight arrangements, the albums range from Tepfer’s lyrical originals to inventive versions of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” and Joe Henderson’s “Inner Urge” — and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” As The New York Times has said about Tepfer: “He has a wide-open sensibility, as tuned into Bach and Björk as to Monk and Wayne Shorter.” Next came the 2010 Sunnyside release Five Pedals Deep, which captured the pianist working in the studio with bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Ted Poor in a set that ranges from ravishing originals to arrangements of a Jacques Brel tune and “Body and Soul.” According to The New York Times review, Five Pedals Deep saw Tepfer “unfurl his lyricism in great silvery arcs.” All Music Guide described the album as “inventive” and “intense,” while Stereophile judged it simply “beautiful.”
After a seven-year break from trio work, Tepfer made a potent return to the format with Eleven Cages (Sunnyside, 2017), which found him ranging alongside Morgan and drummer Nate Wood from hook-heavy originals to a Gershwin standard to a cover of Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” that Popmatters called “delicious.” The UK’s Jazzwise described the album as “one of the very best essays in contemporary piano-trio jazz you’ll hear.” The glowing press coverage, both Stateside and across the Atlantic, kept coming. The New York City Jazz Record said: “Arresting and compelling, adventurous and unpredictable, Eleven Cages jumps right out of the gate with energy and focus.” Jazz Magazine in France described the album as “an entirely personal vision of the art of the trio,” while Jazz Thing in Germany called it “vital, enthralling, diverse, virtuosic and even humorous… Everything has its meaning and purpose.”
Tepfer has composed extensively for orchestras, chamber groups and solo performers. In 2024, he and jazz vocal star Cécile McLorin Salvant premiered the song cycle he wrote for her, Three Poems of Virginie Sampeur, with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra at the UK’s Grange Festival. (Tepfer also played Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G at the festival.) In another 2024 premiere, he played his moving composition Words My Mother Left Me, for choir and piano to words from his late mother’s journal, with the Skylark Ensemble at New York’s Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. Tepfer, playing alongside bassist Michal Baranski and drummer Nate Wood, unveiled his jazz-trio arrangement of Stravinsky’s Baroque-channeling Pulcinella in 2019 at the Incontri In Terra Di Siena festival in Tuscany. In 2016, he premiered his piano quintet Solar Spiral at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, performing with the Avalon String Quartet. He has also received commissions from the Prague Castle Guard Orchestra for two works: the suite Algorithmic Transform (first performed at the Prague Castle in 2015) and a concerto for symphonic wind band and improvising piano, The View from Orohena (2010). Liz Bacher gave the first performance of Tepfer’s Solo Blues for Violin and Piano, playing both instruments, in 2007 at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall.
Tepfer’s honors include winning the first prize and audience prize at the 2006 Montreux Jazz Festival Solo Piano Competition, first prize at the 2006 East Coast Jazz Festival Competition, and first prize at the 2007 competition of the American Pianists Association. He was voted a Best New Artist in JazzTimes (2010) and a Rising Star in DownBeat (2011). The pianist has been named a Cultural Envoy of the U.S. State Department, with travels to Azerbaijan, Georgia and the Czech Republic. He has lectured and led master classes from London to Warsaw to Seoul, and his non-academic writing includes a review of Dr. Stephon Alexander’s The Jazz of Physics for The New York Times in 2016. Tepfer garnered the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2014; a MacDowell Fellowship, with a residency at the MacDowell Colony in 2016; and a three-year creative grant from France’s Fondation BNP-Paribas in 2018.