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Brian Ward

Brian Ward is a keyboardist, recording artist, composer, arranger, and educator from the Pacific Northwest. Ward has performed with Bobby Watson, Will Matthews, Leroy Vinnegar, Bobby Torres, Shirley Nanette, Dee Daniels, Curtis Salgado, Obo Addy, The Oregon Symphony, The Spokane Jazz Orchestra, and others. Brian helped create the "City of Roses" arrangement by Esperanza Spalding, which won a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement for Vocal Performance in 2013. Ward received the 2022 Andrew B. Cius Jr. Award for outstanding student composer at the University of Kansas School of Music. Brian currently lives in Kansas City, where he is active on the jazz scene, performing jazz and blues. He teaches music theory, music history, jazz piano, and jazz ensembles at Benedictine College and Ottawa University.

Awards

Andrew B. Cius Jr. Award, University of Kansas, 2022

Matt Barber: The Song Is You

Read "The Song Is You" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
May 25, 2023

Matt Barber is a pretty good singer: pleasant voice, decent range, fair sense of swing, healthy respect for a lyric. On his seventh album, The Song Is You, Barber has chosen to revisit a number of evergreens from the Great American Songbook and placed himself in a variety of musical settings designed to enhance the experience. A couple of those songs ("Oh! Look at Me Now," “You Make Me Feel So Young") were closely associated with the ...