Frank Kimbrough


Frank Kimbrough was an American post-bop jazz pianist and composer. He was born and raised in Roxboro, North Carolina. He did some work at Chapel Hill before moving to Washington, D.C., in 1980 and then to New York City in 1981.

Biography

Kimbrough started playing the piano at the age of 3, beginning with hymns and then moving on to studies of classical music and his own improvised pieces; however, in rural North Carolina, he had no exposure to jazz until his mid-teens. As he recalled:
In addition to Evans, his main influences included Herbie Nichols, Thelonious Monk, Vince Guaraldi, Keith Jarrett, Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, and Andrew Hill. Outside of jazz, he acknowledged a particular fondness for the Catalan composer Federico Mompou and for shakuhachi music.
In 1985, Kimbrough won the Jacksonville Jazz Festival's Great American Jazz Piano Competition. Soon thereafter, he began a five-year solo gig at the Village Corner, a piano bar in Greenwich Village, playing for six hours four or five nights a week. After signing with Mapleshade Records, he released his first album, Star-Crossed Lovers, on cassette tape in 1986 and recorded his first CD, Lonely Woman, in 1988, although it wasn't released until 1995. Kimbrough often shifted labels but is mostly affiliated with Palmetto, for which he recorded the highly acclaimed trio albums Lullabluebye and Play, which were remastered and rereleased together in 2022.
From 1992 to 2001, he was a member of The Herbie Nichols Project, a repertoire ensemble dedicated to performing both previously known and newly discovered works by the pianist and composer Herbie Nichols. Kimbrough also co-founded The Jazz Composers Collective with bassist Ben Allison.
Throughout his career, Kimbrough recorded albums with a cast of illuminates in the field of jazz music, including Michael Blake, Ron Horton, Joe Locke, Wynton Marsalis, Paul Motian, Paul Murphy, Ted Nash, Scott Robinson, and Kendra Shank. He also played in the Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra and in Ryan Truesdell's Gil Evans Project. Schneider has noted of Kimbrough's playing with her orchestra:
Kimbrough was also a music educator, teaching piano at New York University during the 1990s, and became a professor at the Juilliard School in 2008. He was married for 31 years to the vocalist and composer Maryanne de Prophetis and recorded two albums with her.
Kimbrough's final and most ambitious recording project was a 6-CD set of the complete works of Thelonious Monk for Sunnyside Records. This collection includes 70 compositions by Monk, which is more of Monk's music than Monk himself recorded.
Following Kimbrough's death, apparently from a heart attack, Newvelle Records produced a digital tribute album, Kimbrough, in 2021 that features multiple ensembles covering 58 of his compositions. Contributors to the project include many musicians who performed and recorded with Kimbrough as well as piano peers such as Fred Hersch and Dan Tepfer. In addition, two Kimbrough recordings have been released posthumously by Sunnyside, Ancestors in 2021 and The Call in 2025.

Discography

As leader/co-leader

As sideman/featured soloist

With Ben Allison
  • Seven Arrows
  • Medicine Wheel
  • Third Eye
  • Riding the Nuclear Tiger
  • Peace Pipe
  • Buzz
  • Layers of the City
With Dave Ballou
  • Regards
With Michael Blake
  • Drift
  • Elevated
  • Tiddy Boom
With Katie Bull
  • Freak Miracle
With Jeff Cosgrove
  • Conversations with Owls
With Maryanne de Prophetis
With Ron Horton
  • Genius Envy
  • Subtextures
  • Everything Is a Dream
With Joe Locke
  • Beauty Burning
With Ted Nash
  • Out of This World
  • Rhyme & Reason
  • Still Evolved
  • The Mancini Project
With Rich Perry
  • Left Alone
With Noah Preminger
  • Before the Rain
With Maria Schneider
With Kendra Shank
  • Wish
  • Reflections
  • A Spirit Free: Abbey Lincoln Songbook
  • Mosaic
With Ryan Truesdell's Gil Evans Project
With Dawn Upshaw and Maria Schneider