Judd Danby

Judd Danby is a concert music composer with works in both traditional and electroacoustic media, a jazz performer and composer/arranger, and a music teacher at the Arts & Communications Academy at Jefferson High School in Lafayette, IN, where he works with students in the areas of music theory, composition, and jazz improvisation.

Danby also serves as Artistic Director and President of The Jazz Club, a member-supported jazz concert series in Lafayette, IN (http://thejazzclub.org). The Jazz Club presents local, regional and national artists in an intimate club setting where great performance, deep listening, and educational interaction are the centerpieces.

Danby is also Chair of the Indiana Music Educators Association annual Composition Competition, a member of the National Association for Music Education's Composition Council, and a member of the Lafayette Symphony Orchestra's Music Advisory Board.

Danby's works have been performed at venues throughout the U.S., including the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Ball State University, Connecticut College, Indiana University, Kansas State University, Merkin Hall, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Iowa, Wabash College, and the Tippecanoe Chamber Music Society. His The Piano's Stuck, premiered by Marilyn Nonken, was published by the cutting-edge (and now defunct) Soundout Digital Press, an early online publisher of new music. His Mirrors for percussion quartet is published by Media Press, and his electronic work Twelve Can Play That Game appears on the recording Sound Speculations (University of Illinois CD EMS 9300). His jazz works appear on the Los Blancos Latin Jazz Band CD Receta Original (Red Pepper Records CD374). His compositions have been featured on the radio by WILL-FM (Urbana, IL), Inside Jazz on WBAA-Purdue, and WICR in Indianapolis.

Danby's primary instrument was trumpet from 1975 until 2001, when he switched to performing exclusively as a jazz pianist. He now performs with his own quartet, the InterPlay quartet, the Los Blancos Latin Jazz Band, the Randy Salman Quartet, and other jazz ensembles throughout central Indiana. As an improvising performer in the University of Illinois New Music Ensemble he has performed with Roscoe Mitchell and recorded Anthony Braxton's Composition 165 under the composer's direction (New Albion 050).

Danby holds degrees from Rutgers University (B. Mus. in Jazz Performance) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (M. Mus. and A.Mus.D. in composition-theory). He studied jazz performance with Kenny Barron, Ted Dunbar, William Fielder, John Garvey, Ranny Reeve, and Sahib Shihab, jazz arranging with Mark Kirk, and composition and electroacoustic music with Thomas Fredrickson, John Melby, Scott Wyatt, and Paul Martin Zonn. At the Atlantic Center for the Arts he studied with Milton Babbitt and Donald Martino. His doctoral dissertation comprised a large work for orchestra (Regions) and a monograph on array and superarray structure and projection in Milton Babbitt's orchestral music.

Danby's research and teaching interests include post-tonal pitch-class set theory, Schenkerian analysis, metaphor and cognition, and jazz theory. Show less