D.D. Jackson

D. D. Jackson (born January 25, 1967 in Ottawa) is a Juno Award-winning jazz pianist/composer and composer for film, TV and media whose work spans 12 CDs as leader or co-leader (including two for the major label RCA Victor/BMG and 10 for Justin Time Records) featuring almost entirely original material. He won the Juno Award for Best Contemporary Jazz Album - Instrumental in 2000 for his BMG (RCA Victor) solo piano disc ...so far.

His most recent CDs are Serenity Song (2006 Justin Time), Suite for New York (2003 Justin Time) (a meditation on the events of 9/11), and Sigame, a Latin-tinged work featuring Cuban drummer Dafnis Prieto. An alumnus of the Lehman Engel BMI Advanced Musical Theatre Workshop, Jackson's theatre work includes the opera Trudeau: Long March/Shining Path on the former Canadian Prime Minister and the musical-comedy Depressed, Depressed written with Chicago City Limits veteran Carl Kissin. Jackson performs all over the world with his groups and has also appeared and recorded with some of the most distinguished names in jazz and beyond including: saxophonists David Murray, James Carter, Dewey Redman, James Spaulding and Oliver Lake; trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah; violinists Billy Bang and Regina Carter; bassists Art Davis, William Parker and Ray Drummond; drummers Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson,  Jack Dejohnette, Billy Hart, Andrew Cyrille, Cindy Blackman and Dafnis Prieto; and percussionists Mor Thiam and Mino Cinelu. He is also an accomplished classical pianist and recently released a recording of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue on Summit Records. For five years, Jackson also wrote a regular column for Downbeat magazine entitled “Living Jazz” and maintained the related “D.D. Jackson Living Jazz Podcast”. Jackson is also an alumnus of the Manhattan Producers Alliance, an organization of active producers, engineers and composers writing for film & TV, and was one of the composers for the children's TV show The Wonder Pets (Nickelodeon), which recently won its 4th consecutive Emmy for "Outstanding Musical Direction and Composition", and 3rd & Bird! (BBC Worldwide and currently showing on Disney Junior), both produced by Little Airplane Productions. He also scored the entire 26-episode season of The Ocean Room, a children's TV show produced in Canada by Sinking Ship Productions, which won the 2010 Gemini Award for Best Pre-School Series. His most recent score for film is Hollywood Musical (2011 Force Productions), directed by Alex. P. Baack, for which he also wrote songs with Baack as lyricist.

He is currently based in New York City and teaches at Hunter College and the Harlem School of the Arts.