Sullivan Fortner

New Orleans pianist Sullivan Fortner is an adept, award-winning jazz musician and composer with a bent toward sophisticated post-bop. Born in New Orleans in 1986, Fortner first began playing piano around age four. He was playing in church groups by the time he was nine, and at 13 he enrolled in the famed New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA). As a teenager Fortner excelled at piano, earning scholarships to both the Vail Jazz Institute and Skidmore Jazz Studies summer programs. Having graduated from both NOCCA and his regular high school (where he was Valedictorian), he ...