John Eaton (pianist)
John Livingston Eaton (born May 29, 1934 in Washington, D.C.) is a musician, historian, educator and interpreter of jazz and American popular music. He graduated from Yale University, where he was a member of literary society St. Anthony Hall. Named to the Steinway Concert Artist roster in 1988, Eaton has performed as headliner in the East Room of the White House, and both as soloist and with artists as Zoot Sims, Benny Carter, Clark Terry, and Wild Bill Davison. He has been a featured player at the Kool Jazz Festival and the Smithsonian Institution Performing Arts Jazz series, broadcast nationally on National Public Radio and Radio Smithsonian.[1][2] He graduated from Yale University in 1956.
Characterized by Nat Hentoff as "the complete pianist... the master of just about the whole spectrum of jazz music", John Eaton is profiled in Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler's Encyclopedia of Jazz, and has been reviewed by prominent music critics.[3]
Eaton is known for a CD series project "John Eaton Presents the American Popular Song" in cooperation with the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, the operational partner of the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, comprising thirteen separate, recorded broadcast programs in concert and conversation with jazz bassist Jay Leonhart. Each program focuses on major artists, composers or collaborators in American music, including Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Julie Styne, Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill and Vernon Duke, and Hoagy Carmichael and Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Harry Warren, Jimmy Van Heusen, Frank Loesser, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.