Daegu-born jazz pianist Chu Seong-taek, 30, has been named music director and lead pianist for a high-profile concert series at two of New York’s prominent venues.
Beginning this June, Chu will begin three-year tenures as music director and lead pianist for concert series at Shrine World Music Venue and Smalls Jazz Club.
A native of Daegu, he made his mark at Korea’s leading jazz clubs — Club Evans, Diva Janus and Boogie Woogie. After graduating from the Conservatory of Amsterdam and the Manhattan School of Music, he has built a reputation in the U.S. live-music scene as one of his generation’s standout Korean jazz talents.
In 2022 he served as lead keyboardist and music director for the opening performance at TwitchCon, a global event at Amsterdam’s RAI Center, overseeing arrangements and performances for the large-scale program. In 2025 he appeared as lead pianist at the Tainan Jazz Festival in Taiwan, further demonstrating his international reach.
With this New York appointment, he will serve for three years as music director of the Paul Austerlitz concert series at Shrine World Music Venue, overseeing arrangements in an Afro-Caribbean style that blends Dominican and Haitian traditional rhythms with avant-garde jazz. He will also conduct large ensembles and perform on piano for those shows.
He will concurrently spend three years as music director at Smalls Jazz Club, one of the country’s signature jazz rooms, where he will lead the residencies of Aaron Johnson and Eric Wyatt. Having headed a concert series there in 2024, he intends to expand his presence on the New York jazz scene by handling arrangements, conducting ensembles, coordinating the rhythm section and performing principal piano parts.
