Joey Calderazzo

Who is Joey Calderazzo?

Joey Calderazzo is a jazz pianist.

Inspired by a friend who lived next door, Calderazzo began his piano studies at age seven. He progressed rapidly in a house where other family members were also playing drums and singing, and at 14 became the youngest member of brother Gene Calderazzo's rock band. When the other, significantly older band members enrolled at Boston’s Berklee College of Music and switched their allegiance to jazz, Calderazzo set aside his passions for the Beatles and Led Zeppelin and began listening to Oscar Peterson, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner.

Calderazzo met Michael Brecker at a clinic, and soon the saxophonist was introducing Calderazzo to the jazz world as part of the touring Michael Brecker Quintet beginning in 1987. and on two tracks of the his 1988 album Don’t Try This at Home. Brecker produced Calderazzo’s first disc, In the Door and played on it along with two other tenor saxophonists whom Calderazzo had met in Boston, Jerry Bergonzi and brother Gene’s Berklee roommate Branford Marsalis.

Two more Blue Note albums, To Know One with Bergonzi and Marsalis again featured and the rhythm section completed by Dave Holland and drummer Jack DeJohnette, and The Traveler featuring two different trios, while Secrets, took a different musical direction as Bob Belden surrounded Calderazzo’s trio with a seven-piece ensemble. The ongoing relationship with Brecker found Calderazzo contributing as composer as well as pianist on the saxophonist’s Tales from the Hudson, and as pianist, composer and co-producer on Two Blocks from the Edge. There were further encounters with Bergonzi as well, most frequently in a well-documented quintet led by bassist Bruce Gertz, and the beginning of a more active relationship with Marsalis when Calderazzo assumed one of the keyboard chairs in Marsalis’ Buckshot LeFonque, touring with the group and contributing to its second disc, Music Evolution.