Chase Morrin is a pianist, composer, and educator who has released multiple acclaimed albums and been internationally recognized as a musician who pushes boundaries in jazz and classical music and has created innovative multi-cultural music projects advocating for human rights and equity. He is currently a professor at Berklee College of Music (The Global Jazz Institute) and New England Conservatory Preparatory School in Boston.
Chase has garnered numerous accolades including four ASCAP Young Jazz Composer awards, ten DownBeat awards in composition, arranging and performance, five film scoring and composition awards through the Music Teachers’ Association of California and the Young Composers’ Guild, and was a Yamaha Young Performing Artist. He also received the 2012 ASCAP Jimmy Van Heusen award, the Monterey Jazz Festival’s Gerald Wilson award for his big band composition “Mumphis”, the Los Angeles Music Center Spotlight Award for jazz instrumentalist, and three awards from the National Foundation for the Arts (YoungArts) in classical composition, jazz composition and jazz keyboard.
Chase is currently involved in a number of projects with musicians in the Boston area which include Gapi, a duo ensemble with Korean Gayageum player DoYeon Kim whose self titled album was nominated for a National Korean Music Award, and a pedagogical, experiential-based music program called The Music Alliance Project, bringing jazz and classical musicians together.
In 2016, Chase released a duo album called The Corn Knight with marimbist Yaniv Yacoby, exploring Irish folk, jazz, and classical idioms and later that year, released a trio album with bassist Johnny Chapman and drummer Jongkuk Kim called Turtle. Additionally, he was commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra to compose and write a piano concerto which he performed with the orchestra in April, 2016. His trio won the open combo division at Monterey’s Next Generation Jazz Festival, performed at the Monterey Jazz festival, and was showcased at the Jazz Education Network (JEN) conference multiple times. Chase has held concerts and educational clinics at a number of world-renowned festivals including the Panama Jazz Festival, Monterey Jazz Festival, Reno Jazz Festival, Vail Jazz Festival, Bowdoin International Festival, and Centrum Jazz Festival. He has also performed at Catalina Jazz Club (Hollywood), Vitello’s (Los Angeles), Yoshi’s (San Francisco), Jazz Alley (Seattle); Jazz at Lincoln Center (New York), Dizzy’s, (San Diego), Harvard, NEC, and Berklee to name a few recent venues.
Chase graduated from Harvard May of 2015, earning a B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in Neurobiology, and from New England Conservatory (M.M.), 2016. Chase earned a second M.M. in piano performance at the Global Jazz Institute, Berklee College of Music, 2017. Chase has studied with teachers including Danilo Pérez, Vijay Iyer, Bruce Brubaker, Kati Agocs, John Patitucci, Terri Lyne Carrington, Joe Lovano, Fred Hersch, and Jason Moran. Chase is also a proficient programmer, having conducted research at Cox Lab (Harvard) in computational neurobiology and software engineering at Facebook, NY.
Photo by Chase Morrin.
