David Lanz Biography
28 June 1950, Seattle, Washington, USA. This hugely popular new age artist has been at the forefront of instrumental piano music since the breakthrough success of 1988's Cristofori's Dream. The Seattle-based Lanz grew up playing boogie-woogie style piano, but switched to rock music at high school where he performed with his own band, the Town Cryers. After graduation he combined session work for artists such as Terry Jacks and guitarist Paul Speer with solo work in local nightclubs, where he gradually introduced his own material into the set list of jazz and blues standards. This material eventually found its way onto Heartsounds, Lanz's debut release for Narada Records. Subsequent releases for Narada included recordings made with Eric Tingstad, Nancy Rumbel and Michael Jones, while the first of his collaborations with Speer, Natural States, broke into the Billboard Top 200. Lanz's major success came with Cristofori's Dream, a concept album based on the life of Bartolommeo Cristofori, the seventeenth-century inventor of the piano. The album stayed at number 1 for over six months on Billboard's New Age chart, establishing Lanz as one of the most popular of the new wave of instrumental artists. In 1990, he played at the Welcoming Ceremony of the Goodwill Games in Seattle and recorded the ambitious double CD set, Skyline Firedance. In stark contrast, one disc featured Lanz accompanied by the IFS Philharmonic Orchestra of Munich, while the other comprised unaccompanied piano solos. Lanz sustained his commercial success throughout the 90s while continuing to experiment on recordings. Bridge Of Dreams included two vocals from Lanz, while 1998's Songs From An English Garden comprised cover versions of British Invasion-era material. His debut for Decca Records, East Of The Moon, was a suitably ambitious juxtaposition of instrumental pop and multi-part suite for piano and orchestra.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin. Licensed from Muze.
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