Bill Stevens - Piano

Bill is an active jazz pianist in the North Carolina area. He was the house pianist at The Know Bookstore and Restaurant in Durham NC from April of 2008 through March of 2010. He also leads a trio with musicians Weldon Kollock (trombone) and Chip Newton (guitar), performing regularly at The Irregardless Cafe in Raleigh, The Land's End Clubhouse in Emerald Isle, and at numerous private parties. "In today's world, where recordings and the Internet have made outstanding music commonplace, we seek to invite listeners into a kind of experience they could only have with live improvisation. We do this by emphasizing spontaneous interaction amongst performers and cultivating deep emotional attunement with the listening audience." Since December of 2008, the Bill Stevens Trio has been collaborating with artist Mike Stevens, exploring the synergy of combining improvised music with live painting.

Bill was Artist in Residence at The Dublin School in Dublin New Hampshire, April - May of 2010, teaching classes in Walden School Musicianship and giving a concert with his trio. He will be leading a jazz quintet (musicians plus painter) as part of The Walden School's Summer Concert Series, July 11, 2010. (All events in this series are free and open to the public.)

Bill has been on the faculty of The Walden School's Young Musicians' Program since 2000 and Teacher Training Institute since 2006. He has been exploring how to apply the unique pedagogy of The Walden School Musicianship Course to jazz instruction since 2000 and has been offering classes in Jazz Musicianship since 2001. Bill is the author of Jazz Musicianship: A Guidebook for Integrated Learning, volume 1 of which will be released in the summer of 2010.

Bill is an alumni of The Oberlin Conservatory, graduating Pi Kappa Lambda in 2000 with a major in Music Composition and an independently designed major in Oral Music - focusing on listening and improvisation. His teachers included John Luther Adams, Randolph Coleman, Param Vir, Sanford Margolis, and Neal Creque. He has a Masters Degree in Piano Performance from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, graduating Pi Kappa Lambda in 2002, where he studied with Andrew Willis.

As a young composer, Bill's work received national recognition. He was named a level 1 Arts finalist by the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts (NFAA) and received The Presidential Scholars award in the arts (1995).

Bill holds a Three-Year Teaching Certificate in Deep Listening (tm) from The Deep Listening Institute (formerly The Pauline Oliveros Foundation). He has also served a year's apprenticeship with composer Pauline Oliveros, studying and teaching Deep Listening under her mentorship. Deep Listening is a practice of listening to sounds with meditative awareness, using this awareness as a point of entry into creativity in general and improvisation in particular.

Curious about the relationship between creativity, meditation, and psychological process, Bill enrolled in The Helix Training program in New York City, a four year self-transformational training whose mission is to bring together the divide between psychological and spiritual teachings around growth and healing. Completing this course of study in 2007, Bill became an ordained member of The Helix Healing Ministry: a transparent ministry, not affiliated with the beliefs of any particular religious tradition. Continuing to pursue an interest in healing work, Bill is currently an advanced level student of Somatic Experiencing (TM), a modality concerned with restoring optimal functioning of the nervous system in the wake of overwhelming life experiences. Show less