Craig Taborn

Born in 1970 in Golden Valley, in the Minneapolis metropolitan area in the United States, pianist and composer Craig Taborn is part of the contemporary jazz field, at the crossroads of post‑bop, improvised music and electronic and minimalist influences. Trained at the University of Michigan, Taborn came to attention in the early 1990s in James Carter’s quartet before moving to New York and becoming integrated into the city’s creative jazz and improvisation scenes. His first album as a leader, recorded as a trio for the Japanese label DIW in 1994, inaugurated his work on the acoustic piano, which he pursued with Light Made Lighter in 2001 and with the electro‑jazz project Junk Magic in 2004. From the 2010s Taborn developed a substantial body of work on ECM, notably the solo Avenging Angel (2011), the trio Chants (2013), the quartet Daylight Ghosts (2017) and a new solo, Shadow Plays (2021). Highly present as a sideman with musicians such as Tim Berne, Chris Potter and Roscoe Mitchell, Taborn alternates between solo, trio and larger ensembles, working with the layering of repetitive motifs, varying sonic density and a nuanced relationship to groove, between abstraction and restrained lyricism.