Shelly Berg
Shelly Berg is a Steinway piano artist and five-time Grammy-nominated arranger, orchestrator, and producer. His album projects Gershwin Reimagined: An American in London (Decca Gold), The Deep (Chesky), The Nearness of You (Arbors), Blackbird (Concord) and The Will (CARS) are critically acclaimed. Berg earned three Grammy nominations in the Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocal(s) category with jazz singer-lyricist Lorraine Feather and international superstar Gloria Estefan, and a fourth Grammy nomination as co-producer of Gloria Estefan: The Standards (Sony). He earned his fifth Grammy nomination as co-arranger of “I Loves You Porgy / There’s a Boat That’s Leavin’ Soon for New York” from the album Rendezvous (2018) featuring jazz singers Clint Holmes and Dee Dee Bridgewater with The Count Basie Orchestra. Recent projects include recording and/or performing with Tony Bennett, Seal, Lizz Wright, Andra Day, Clint Holmes, Renée Fleming, and Arturo Sandoval. He is also the host of a monthly radio show Generation Next on Sirius XM, music director of The Jazz Cruise, and artistic advisor for the Jazz Roots series at the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami.
An award-winning educator with 40 years of leadership in higher education, Shelly Berg is Dean and Patricia L. Frost Professor of Music at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. He was previously the McCoy/Sample Professor of Jazz Studies at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California and a past president of the International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE). In 2003 he was honored as Educator of the Year by the Los Angeles Jazz Society and in 2002 received the IAJE Lawrence Berk Leadership Award. In 2000 the Los Angeles Times named him one of three “Educators for the Millennium.”
His textbooks include Essentials of Jazz Theory, the Chop-Monster beginning improvisation series, Rhythm Section Workshop for Jazz Directors (Alfred Music) and Jazz Improvisation: The Goal-Note Method (Kendor). He has appeared as a performer and lecturer throughout the United States as well as in Canada, China, Mexico, Europe, Israel, Japan, Romania and Venezuela.