A Chicago native, pianist and composer Ryan Cohan is, more than twenty years since he first began his career in music, a distinguished representative of one of jazz’s most prominent tendencies in the twentieth-first century, mainly focused on the exploration of jazz through the prism of its associations not only with classical music but also with the music from non-Western cultures and geographies. A graduate of DePaul University, the outset of his musical path takes place in the middle-1990’s when he recorded his first solo album, “Real World”, and began to gain notoriety due to his compositions and arrangements for multiple Ramsey Lewis’ albums and writing the theme music for his TV show "The Legends of Jazz". While collaborating with world-renowned jazz ensembles and musicians such as The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Freddie Hubbard, Curtis Fuller, Joe Locke or Kurt Elling, among many others, Ryan Cohan has been building over the years an expansive body of work in several formats and configurations, including piano solo pieces, orchestral arrangements and scores for independent films. Cohan, a Guggenheim Fellow in music composition, has released six albums of original work to this date, the last of which, “Originations” (2020), is a six-movement suite written for jazz sextet and string quartet that juxtaposes Jewish and Arabic musical languages, blending them with classical compositional elements and improvisation.

In Guimarães Jazz’s 2021 edition, Ryan Cohan will perform with his quintet and will be also responsible for the festival’s partnership with ESMAE. As always since the beginning of the project, the North-American pianist and composer will direct this school’s big band, therefore carrying out the educative and formative role that we believe to be part of Guimarães Jazz’s mission.