Alan Broadbent

Alan Broadbent

Alan Broadbent was born in Auckland, NZ, and in 1966 received a Downbeat Magazine Scholarship to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston. He also studied with the great jazz pianist, Lennie Tristano, at that time. In 1969 he joined the Woody Herman band as pianist and arranger for three years, after which he settled in Los Angeles. There he became associated with many well known musicians and artists including Irene Kral, Ruth Price, Natalie Cole, Nelson Riddle and Johnny Mandel. In the late 1980s he became a member of Charlie Haden’s Quartet West, touring and recording for 25 years. Alan has won two Grammys as an arranger for Natalie Cole and Shirley Horn and has been nominated fourteen times, including piano solo and trio recordings and his orchestral works for the London Metropolitan Orchestra, “Developing Story” and “Broadbent Plays Brubeck”. Most recently he has recorded three trio albums with Harvie S and Billy Mintz. “New York Notes”, “Trio In Motion” and “Like Minds”, with a soon to be released jazz sextet of his compositions, “Threads Of Time” (Savant Records). In April of 2024, the great WDR big band of Cologne, Germany, invited him to arrange and perform an evening of music dedicated to Miles Davis’s compositions of the 1950s, an era of jazz he is particularly fond of and which can be seen on YouTube. He is currently Professor of Jazz Studies at NYU and resides with his wife and son in New Jersey.