Michael Echaniz

Biography

Michael Echaniz is one of the brightest musicians, composers, and artists emerging from the West Coast. A pianist since five, Michael has studied music at California Jazz Conservatory (B.M.), and CalArts (MFA). Michael is an avid performer, playing and recording alongside internationally renowned artists and pillars of the Bay Area music scene such as Jeff Denson, Romain Pilon, Wu Man, Gerald Cleaver, Paul McCandless, Scott Amendola, Erik Jekabson’s Electric Squeezebox Orchestra, Dillon Vado, Alan Hall, Steve Lugerner, and Friction Quartet in venues such as Piedmont Piano Company, Black Cat, the Art Boutiki, Yoshi’s, and Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, as well as Umbria, Montreux, Fillmore, and Portola Vineyards jazz festivals. Michael has won numerous awards, mostly recently, Honorable Mentions in the 2023 Unsigned Only and 2022 International Songwriting Competition, a New Music Workshop at the 2022 International Jazz Composers’ Symposium (ISJAC), and the prestigious 2021 ASCAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composers Award. On September 8th, 2023, Michael released Seven Shades of Violet (Rebiralost), an ambitious, virtuosic, symmetrical concept album of original compositions and arrangements on Ridgeway Records, supported by InterMusic SF’s 2020 Musical Grant Program and New Music USA’s Creator Development Fund in 2022-23. The debut has received wide critical acclaim, including a coveted 4-star review in Downbeat Magazine, earning a place in the publication’s “Best Albums of 2023” list. Michael’s forward-thinking original music embraces rhythmic complexity, haunting melodicism, fluidity between improvisation and through- composition, influence from disparate styles of classical, world, and pop music, and deep emotional connection.