Mike del Ferro (NL)

International Award winning Pianist / Composer Mike del Ferro was born in Amsterdam.His father was opera singer Leonard del Ferro who sang and recorded with Maria Callas and Leonard Bernstein.He started studying classical piano at the age of nine and after falling in love with Jazz he pursued his studies on Jazz and received a Master in Contemporary Music at the Amsterdam Conservatory. Mike also studied composition and arranging with Bob Brookmeyer at the Musikhochschule in Cologne, Germany.

He won several Awards: the First Prize at the Rotterdam Jazz Piano Competition, the Soloist Prize at the Europe Jazz Contest in Brussels, and First Prize at the Karlovy Vary Jazz contest.

His reputation as a soloist, accompanist, composer and arranger has led to performances and recordings with musicians such as Toots Thielemans, Branford Marsalis, Jack DeJohnette, Randy Brecker, Oscar Castro Neves, Deborah Brown, Erik Truffaz, Jorge Rossy, Scott Hamilton, Richard Galliano, and many others. He has released more then 20 albums under his own name and he has appeared as a sideman on many albums in different genres from Dixieland to Salsa. He also gives Piano Masterclasses all over the world and his successful Clinic “Self Management for Musicians”.

Mike has travelled the world extensively (so far 117 countries), searching for collaborations with musicians from cultures quite different to his own, and the musical results have been eye-opening, building musical bridges between cultures not normally within reach of each other. He has managed to combine elements of the revered canons of Western music interspersed with the audacity of Jazz improvisation, and paying tribute to the ancient structures of Asian, South American and African traditional music.