John Davis - Pianist

With his latest Newport Classic CD, entitled Halley's Comet: Around the Piano with Mark Twain & John Davis, pianist John Davis pays tribute to our country's most celebrated and influential author, whose career, like Davis', lies at the intersection between white and black culture and high and low culture in American society. More importantly, Halley's Comet continues what Davis began with not just one, but two, earlier hit recordings on Newport Classic--to define, excavate, and disseminate a previously-unacknowledged American roots music. John Davis Plays Blind Tom, featuring the music of the Georgia slave pianist, Blind Tom, became a top-ten seller in classical music at Tower Records and Amazon.com, and, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "singlehandedly revived the lost legacy of Thomas Wiggins." Marshfield Tornado: John Davis Plays Blind Boone, highlighting the works of John William Boone, a sightless pianist from Missouri who modeled his career on Blind Tom's, has been a repeat #1 record on the "Ragtime" chart at Amazon.com, and was singled out by Gramophone, the esteemed British music publication, for "turning the prehistory of jazz and blues into the living history of one remarkable man." "In John Davis' hands," reports Living Blues, the world's premier blues magazine, Boone's piano works become "more than artifacts--they live, with an immediacy that cannot be denied."

Davis' instrumental mastery, cultivated at The Juilliard School and Brown University, and his lifelong immersion in African-American music, literature, and folklore, lie at the core of his career as performer, recording artist, author, and collector. His grassroots pursuit of forgotten black culture has led him to remote corners of the United States and to amass a personal archive of rare 19th- and early 20th-century printed African Americana that is the source for many of the ideas and materials that have filtered into his concerts, recordings, and writings. Davis' recent appearances at Strathmore, Joe's Pub in New York, and other important classical, jazz, and roots music venues across the United States, marked the listening public's first exposure to countless piano works not heard since the lifetime of their composers who, both white and black, had been missing links on the continuum of American music.

Initially, Davis caught the public's attention during runs of his one-man, multi-media theatrical concert about Blind Tom, entitled Will the Real Thomas Wiggins Please Stand Up!, at the Culture Project in New York and at Brown University's Rites & Reason Theater, and via a performance of Blind Tom's music at The Martin Luther King Festival 2000 sponsored by National Public Radio, the Atlanta Symphony, the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and Morehouse-Spelman College. Soon thereafter, a substantial front page article in the "Arts and Leisure" section of The New York Times about the release of John Davis Plays Blind Tom catapulted that CD into a top-ten classical seller at Tower Records and Amazon.com. The success of that recording led to stories about Davis' pursuit of Blind Tom on CNN, CNN-International, the BBC World News, Into the Music on ABC Radio National (Australia), as well as on NPR's All Things Considered and Performance Today. Subsequent acknowledgments of Davis' contributions were given in The New Yorker, The Independent (London), Time Out New York, Scientific American, and the magazine of African-American culture, American Legacy. Since then, Will the Real Thomas Wiggins Please Stand Up! inaugurated the 2003-2004 season at The Symphony Space in New York. Another performance of the show at the Springer Opera House, the State Theater of Georgia was filmed for an extended story about Davis and Blind Tom on PBS's Life 360, and a program-long interview of Davis was aired on ABC's Nightline Up-Close, later featured in a special "Best of Up-Close" edition.

John Davis Plays Blind Tom has even resonated beyond the world of classical music. It was adopted by Lorna Simpson as the soundtrack to Corridor (2003), the esteemed African-American artist's film installation, commissioned by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoca), that was the centerpiece of the mid-career retrospective of Simpson's work that traveled in 2006 and 2007 to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Miami Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum in New York. Davis' recording also inspired singer/songwriter Grant-Lee Phillips to write "Blind Tom," a song included on his latest release, Little Moon, as well as Terry Clarke to write and record, "Blind Tom in Hoboken," for the British Rockabilly artist's CD, Night Ride to Birmingham. And a cut from John Davis Plays Blind Tom (alongside those of Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole, Loretta Lynn, Al Green, Buddy Holly, Erykah Badu, Lightnin' Hopkins, Ricky Skaggs, Zora Neale Hurston, Joe Tex,The Pilgrim Travelers, and Johnny Winter, among others) was the only classical performance selected for the accompanying CD to the "7th Annual Southern Music Issue" of the Oxford American, the magazine of Southern Culture founded by writer John Grisham and long prized by roots music aficionados.

Davis has also added extensively to the literature on Blind Tom and Blind Boone. In addition to Will the Real Thomas Wiggins Please Stand Up! and his own extensive liner notes to Halley's Comet, Marshfield Tornado, and John Davis Plays Blind Tom, the supplementary essays in the accompanying booklet to John Davis Plays Blind Tom by the actor, sleight-of-hand artist, and scholar of eccentric performers, Ricky Jay; the neurologist and eminent writer, Oliver Sacks; and the poet, playwright, music critic, and political activist, Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones); constitute significant contributions to Blind Tom scholarship by major literary figures. Davis has also written the entry on Blind Tom in the one-volume African American Lives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and published in 2004 by Oxford University Press in conjunction with the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. That same entry appeared with others by Davis on Blind Boone and Louis Moreau Gottschalk in the landmark, multi-volume African American National Biography, released by Oxford University Press in February, 2008. Davis also co-authored a substantial chapter on Blind Tom and autism for the book, Stress and Coping in Autism, published by Oxford University Press in 2006.

Prior to his work with Mark Twain, Blind Tom, and Blind Boone, Davis had already earned critical praise for his recital debuts at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall and Wigmore Hall in London, and his regular collaborations with many of the world's most respected young chamber musicians. After solo recitals in San Francisco, Chicago, and St. Louis, he was invited by the U.S. State Department for several tours of Asia and Eastern Europe, during which he appeared as concerto soloist with the Rousse Philharmonic in Bulgaria and became the first American artist in over a half-century to perform in long-isolated Albania. Davis subsequently appeared with the Bombay Chamber Orchestra as part of a nationwide tour of India. He has been profiled in countless foreign and domestic print publications, as well as on ABC's Good Morning America, The Today Show on NBC, and King Biscuit Time, "Sunshine" Sonny Payne's legendary blues program on KFFA-Radio in Helena, Arkansas that launched the careers of bluesmen Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Jr. Lockwood. And on the heels of his success with Will the Real Thomas Wiggins Please Stand Up!, Davis charted new territory in Rome, Los Angeles, Boston, and New York, with The John Davis Caravan: Standing At the Crossroads, his chitlin' circuit-inspired nightclub show of black music-influenced piano works.

A graduate of The Phillips Exeter Academy, Davis holds a B.A. from Brown, where he studied piano with Aube Tzerko, Gabriel Chodos, and Seth Carlin while completing a double major in History and Russian Language and Literature. He subsequently earned a Master's Degree in piano at Juilliard under the tutelage of Beveridge Webster, and studied with Herbert Stessin. John Davis is a Steinway Artist.