About Steven Solomon

A Classical Foundation

Steven was four when he started with Julie Lovison at Chicago’s Lake Shore Music Studio, and eighteen when he finally left her. Fourteen years of scales in a North Side studio bought him something most event pianists never get: real classical technique, laid down before he had a taste in music at all. Jazz arrived later and never displaced it. He works in both idioms now, which is why an evening can pass from a Chopin nocturne to a Gershwin standard without anyone noticing the seam.

• Fourteen years under Julie Lovison, Lake Shore Music Studio
• Master classes with Ken Chaney, Steve Million and Peter Saxe
• Study with saxophonist, pianist and educator Diane Ellis

Going Pro at Ten Years Old

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Most ten-year-olds are made to practice. Steven was booked. The room was Eli’s Cheesecake on the Northwest Side, the fee was small, but it settled a question early, and he has never seriously reopened it. By twelve he was working Chicago’s jazz rooms on school nights — a standing residency he held until he left for university, carrying a selective-enrollment course load the whole time.

• Northside College Prep, Chicago
• Jazz Institute of Chicago Kiewit-Wang Mentorship Award — one of three high-school jazz musicians chosen that year
• Louis Armstrong Jazz Award and Cedric Hampton Music Award

Formally Educated in Jazz and Classical Piano

At Western Illinois University, on a full four-year Trustee Scholarship, Steven read both piano traditions at once — jazz under Dr. Michael Stryker, classical under Dr. Tammie Walker — while studying voice with Professor Kitty Karn. He graduated summa cum laude in Music Education. That dual training is unusual among event pianists, and it is the practical reason he can take almost any request in almost any key, and move from a Chopin nocturne to a Gershwin standard without anyone noticing the seam.

• Summa cum laude and Honors Graduate, School of Fine Arts and Communications
• Full four-year Trustee Scholarship and the Ann Collins Jazz Piano Scholarship
• Voice with Professor Kitty Karn

Carnegie Hall Debut

The Stern Auditorium, on the Ronald Perelman Stage, at twenty years old. Nobody forgets the walk from the wing to the bench in that room. It reset his sense of what a performance owes an audience, and every room since — ballroom, terrace, living room — has been held to the standard set that night.

• Carnegie Hall — Stern Auditorium, Ronald Perelman Stage
• Symphony Center, Chicago — six appearances
• Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park; the Green Mill; the Chicago Jazz Festival

Laurel Canyon

Steven moved into Laurel Canyon, the eucalyptus-choked canyon above the Sunset Strip where Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Jackson Browne wrote the most durable decade in American songwriting — his place sitting just below the house where King shot the cover of Tapestry. It is a strange, quiet pocket of a loud city: coyotes at dusk, no sidewalks, and a peculiar hush after dark. He walked it most nights. Much of what he plays now was worked out on those walks and finished at the piano when he got home. From that canyon he built a career as pianist to the stars one review at a time, treating every engagement with the highest level of discretion and professionalism.

• Hotel Bel-Air, The Beverly Hills Hotel, Spago, Disneyland
• Frank Sinatra’s Twin Palms Estate and the Liberace Museum
• Activations for Rolls-Royce, Hulu, La Roche-Posay and National Geographic
• Artist in Residence, Lyon College — jazz improvisation master class and solo concert

Sweet Home Chicago

The city he learned to play in is the city he came back to. Steven now divides his time between Los Angeles and Chicago with his wife and son, keeping a recording studio in each and traveling internationally wherever the next engagement calls. Both are home; neither is a former address. What Chicago gets is a hometown pianist who spent two decades in Hollywood’s most exacting rooms and brought the standard back with him.

• Shared the stand with Willie Pickens, Bobby Watson, GRAMMY® winner John Clayton, Dee Alexander and Mark Colby
• Performed for Mayor Richard Daley and Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White
• Corporate engagements for McDonald’s, Boeing, Kraft, American Girl and Chase
• Multi-instrumentalist, arranger and quick-study sight reader

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Years as a professional pianist

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Performances and counting

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5-star client reviews

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Songs memorized