Kimbrough, Frank

views updated

Kimbrough, Frank

Kimbrough, Frank, American pianist; b. Rox-boro, N.C., Nov. 2, 1956. He started out his career as a protege of Shirley Horn and in 1985 won the Great American Jazz Piano Competition. Since then he has covered a lot of stylistic territory, working with blues-man B.B. King, World fusionist Paul Horn, and avant garde musician Anthony Braxton, as well as appearing on albums by Ted Nash and with the tonally adventurous Maria Schneider Jazz Orch. Although the first couple of recordings under his name (the solo Star-Crossed Lovers and piano /drums duet Double Vision, both on Mapleshade) were cassette-only affairs that have been discontinued, he has recorded some projects in the 1990s that should be around awhile. A founding member of the Jazz Composers Collective, he is a composer-in-residence with the collective and has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Meet the Composer. He also serves on the faculties of the Cannon Music Camp at Appalachia State Univ. and at N.Y.U.

Discography

Lonely Woman (1990); The Herbie Nichols Project: Love Is Proximity (1997).

—Garaud MacTaggart/David Prince

More From encyclopedia.com