About Daniel Kelly / The Daniel Kelly Group

Pianist & composer Daniel Kelly first performed at Jazz at the Lake in 2004 with the Harvie S band. He returned over the years with his Emerge Trio, the WORKS Trio with Joe Lovano, and his multimedia collaboration with The Seeing with Photography Collective, Blind Visionaries, inaugurating the first Friday evening Jazz at the Lake performance.

An artist who explores the meeting place of music with literature, visual art and journalism with his various projects, Daniel has created several works that incorporate poetry, including All the World’s a Song: Shakespeare in Jazz, which interprets Shakespeare’s words as lyrics to jazz songs.

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the festival, Daniel uses the poetry of Paul Pines as inspiration for the music for this year’s performance. Paul, who founded the Lake George Jazz Weekend along with John Strong in 1984, was a dear friend to Daniel. He previously collaborated with Paul in his final months in 2018, composing settings for poems from his book Gathering Sparks in a 45-minute suite scored for a jazz septet titled Museum of the Infinite. This year, Daniel will explore Paul’s poetry throughout his writing career, anthologized in the collection A Furnace in the Shadows: Selected Poems.

Kelly’s music has been declared “powerfully moving” by Time Out New York. He has performed with Grammy-award winners Joe Lovano & Nicole Zuraitis, hip-hop star Lauryn Hill, cutting-edge modern classical The Bang on a Can All-Stars and a long list of jazz musicians such as NEA Jazz Masters Dave Liebman & Sheila Jordan, Don Byron, Donny McCaslin, Bobby Sanabria and many others.

Rakonto, Kelly’s series of interview-based concerts, have been commissioned by 13 performing art centers across the US. Each of these concert-length works have transformed stories of everyday people – farmers, teachers, students, seniors, immigrants and hurricane survivors – into dramatic and compelling music that celebrates our shared human experience.

Daniel has been honored to continue Paul’s role as Curator of Jazz at the Lake for the past five years.

“I remain convinced that Daniel Kelly is one of the most stunningly original talents both as an improviser and a leader that I have known in a long career of promoting this art form. His musical ideas spring naturally from a visionary imagination.” — Paul Pines, Curator, Lake George Jazz Weekend

HIS MUSIC