Jordan Seigel

Los Angeles-based composer, pianist and orchestrator Jordan Seigel possesses an expressive, original voice in a stunning variety of media. Whether scoring projects for film and television or performing and improvising before rapt audiences on stages around the world, Seigel approaches every pursuit with the same mission in mind: to create music that truly moves people.

Over the past decade, Seigel has juggled his diverse interests while gaining a steadily rising profile in each realm. Although the arenas of film scoring, jazz and orchestration may seem worlds apart, Seigel’s singular voice is a common thread running through each. Rich with wit and spontaneity, his music brilliantly captures the mood of a moment whether accompanying a scene or conjuring one. His work offers inventive new twists for aficionados while inviting in the uninitiated with an adherence to strong, memorable melodicism.

His original music for films and television includes the underscore for the musical comedy Lucky Stiff and contributing additional music to Jordan Peele’s revival of The Twilight Zone, the Revolutionary War thriller TURN: Washington’s Spies, and the dystopian Young Adult adaptation The Giver, among many others. He has also crafted arrangements for the National Symphony Orchestra’s concerts at the Kennedy Center with superstars like Common and Babyface, showcasing another side of his estimable versatility.

A Los Angeles native, Seigel’s gifts were evident at an early age, earning him a full scholarship to the prestigious Berklee College of Music. During his time on the east coast he studied with such greats as Danilo Pérez, Fred Hersch, and Aaron Goldberg, and garnered a number of accolades including the Alex Ulanowski Award in Composition, the Michael Rendish Award in Film Scoring, and two Jazz Performance Awards.

With his multi-faceted debut album, Beyond Images, Seigel weaves together his foremost passions with a scintillating and eclectic collection of original songs inspired by cinema’s greatest composers. Beyond Images combines the inventiveness and interplay of jazz with the transportive emotional power of the best film scores, crafting an evocative soundtrack for imaginary scenes possessing the spine-tingling suspense of a Hitchcock thriller or the heartbreaking sweep of a doomed romance.

The wide range of his tastes is represented by the vast difference in style and approach represented by his piano heroes, Oscar Peterson and Brad Mehldau. While both are virtuosic individuals, one is the epitome of blues-based, straight-ahead swing and the other an inventive modernist with an introspective bent. It’s evident from his music that Seigel imbibed crucial lessons from both; his playing is equally deft at the celebratory and the intimate. His original music, in whichever medium, draws inspiration from these and an expansive palette of other influences: Stevie Wonder, Radiohead, The Beatles, Maurice Ravel, Stravinsky, along with the film composers whose work sparked Beyond Images.

As disparate as those artists might seem, they all captured Seigel’s imagination for a common reason, one that set him on his own individual path: an uncanny ability to connect directly with the heart and soul of a listener. That’s been Seigel’s goal since he returned to the west coast and caught the bug for film scoring. Since that time he’s been deeply immersed in the world of visual media, accumulating a host of impressive credits as a composer and orchestrator for film and television, including work on such high-profile projects as Ant-Man and the Wasp, The LEGO Movie 2, Trolls, and Empire.

Seigel’s first credits were as a performer, playing the piano on-screen in Glee and behind the scenes on The X Factor. He’s since performed on the scores for The Morning Show, Deadwood: The Movie, and the upcoming Penny Dreadful: City of Angels. He is also the featured pianist for the Apple TV+ animated series Snoopy In Space, which finds him following in the venerable footsteps of legendary pianist Vince Guaraldi.

Seigel has maintained an active role on the L.A. scene, playing with such acclaimed artists as Peter Erskine, Jeff Hamilton, Graham Dechter and the Bill Holman Big Band, and performing on such prestigious stages as Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Playboy Jazz Festival and the Beantown Jazz Festival.
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