Ravinia is grateful for the support of the Elaine Frank Artist Fund.
While people Jahari Stampley’s age may be quipping about staving off quarter-life crises, the 25-year-old Chicago-native pianist is understandably more focused on cultivating virtuosities. A year ago, he released his debut album, Still Listening, and a couple months later played the final round of the Herbie Hancock Competition, a prominent proving ground for young jazz artists. “I’ve heard some of the best pianists in the world. In a sense, he really challenges them,” Hancock said, awarding Stampley the top prize, “I’ve never heard anybody play quite like that. … I was thinking, ‘Maybe I should study with him.’ ” The New York Times was equally effusive: “Stampley’s style arrived like a lightning bolt … unforced, as if powered from an internal engine.”
Practically a fait accompli, he ended 2023 as the Tribune’s Chicagoan of the Year for Jazz—a swift ascent for someone who first touched a keyboard 10 years earlier growing up in the Austin neighborhood, regardless of auditioning into the Ravinia Jazz Scholars for his senior year of high school and earning an ASCAP scholarship in half that time. He also earned the Chicago Youth Symphony Alumni Award—the only non-classical musician to receive the honor—and a Luminarts Fellowship with Still Listening.
Stampley has turned big-name ears since his teens—including the likes of Jill Scott, Robert Glasper, Cory Henry, and Jacob Collier—toured with Stanley Clarke, and featured on Derrick Hodge’s Color of Noise and the film Spinning Gold. His stage credits grow more extensive by the day, already including Radio City Music Hall and Carnegie Hall, The Met Philadelphia, Chicago’s Aragon, and San Francisco Jazz Center, plus solo tour dates in Geneva, Switzerland, and Berlin, Köthen, and Magdeburg, Germany. His now trio features fellow Manhattan School of Music alum Miguel Russell on drums and his musically polymathic mother D-Erania on sax, synths, and more.
