Making Music around the World—and at Summer Session!
With her nuanced touch, accurate style, and bright smile, Stephanie Trick (US'05) is one of today’s best stride and classic jazz pianists. Her ever-growing list of concerts includes appearances at the Vancouver Jazz Festival, San Diego Jazz Fest, Breda Jazz Festival in the Netherlands, Boogie Woogie Festival in Lugano, Switzerland, and Kobe Jazz Street Festival in Japan, to name only a few. In addition, her albums have been reviewed and featured in many well-known publications in the U.S. and France. Trick earned her undergraduate degree in music from the University of Chicago. That’s also where she began performing professionally and discovered her love for jazz from the ’20s and ’30s. In February 2012, the Hot Club of France awarded Trick its New Talent 2011 Prize for her Stephanie Trick LIVE album. That same year, she received the prestigious Kobe-Breda Jazz Friendship Award. Along with playing solo, Trick performs in a four-hands piano duo with Italian jazz pianist Paolo Alderighi (her husband) and in a trio with Danny Coots on drums and Phil Flanigan on string bass. More recently, she and Lorraine Feather, a vocalist and Grammy nominee, formed the duo Nouveau Stride. Their debut CD is titled Fourteen. Trick credits her time at Principia for her outstanding success today. The principled education she received became, as she puts it, “the basis of everything I did. . . . I followed my highest sense of right without a sense of limitation and followed my dreams to become a musician.” Update: Stephanie and Paolo will be performing at Summer Session 2014 on June 12 at 7:30 p.m. in Principia College’s Cox Auditorium. This article originally appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of Principia Purpose.