Jon Weber is a New York City and Chicago-based jazz pianist and composer (born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1961) whose compositions and performances have met critical and popular acclaim in many countries around the world. Largely self-taught, Weber has perfect pitch and remarkable melodic recall. He currently serves as host of Piano Jazz Rising Stars on NPR.
Weber began playing at a very young age, lived and performed for many years in Chicago, and now resides in New York City. He has performed and recorded with a broad range of musicians in the United States, Europe, India, Japan and Australia.
His album "Jazz Wagon" was released in 1993, followed by a live album, "Flying Keys", and "It's Never Quite the Same" an album of tunes by composers Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. His most recent album, Simple Complex, features his own compositions. It was released in 2004 with Weber on piano, drummer Mark Walker, Eric Alexander on sax, trumpeters Diego Urcola and Roy Hargrove, bassists Avishai Cohen, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Peter Washington and Gary Burton on vibraphone.
Weber has appeared on many broadcasts including NPR's Piano Jazz with pianist Marian McPartland, and Jazz Inspired with Judy Carmichael. In January 2012 he began hosting an updated version of the popular Piano Jazz program, now called Piano Jazz Rising Stars on National Public Radio, replacing Ms. McPartland, who stepped down from her longtime hosting duties in the fall of 2011.
Famous quotes containing the words jon and/or weber:
“The dog is mentioned in the Bible eighteen times—the cat not even once.”
—W.E. Farbstein. Quoted in “Hundkeit,” Mondo Canine, ed. Jon Winokur, Dutton (1991)
“No sociologist ... should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time. One cannot with impunity try to transfer this task entirely to mechanical assistants if one wishes to figure something, even though the final result is often small indeed.”
—Max Weber (1864–1920)