$15 admission / 4:45pm doors / 5pm start / seated
David’s music is born in the moment. He steps to the piano without a script, without a score, and allows the music to find him. Each performance is a complete journey, improvised from beginning to end, as though the instrument itself were remembering fragments of history and dreaming forward into the unknown.
Those who hear him often recognize voices he himself has never studied. His playing has been compared to Abdullah Ibrahim, though he was unfamiliar with Ibrahim’s work. Others hear echoes of Keith Jarrett’s searching lyricism or McCoy Tyner’s elemental drive. Pianist Richie Beirach once remarked that David’s sound is “what would have happened if Chopin fucked Cecil Taylor”—a collision of lyric beauty with uncompromising fire.
At the foundation of David’s artistry lies a lifelong intimacy with classical music. Since childhood, he has carried a deep kinship with Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms. Their presence is alive in his touch—the architecture, the weight, the spiritual intensity. At the piano, this inheritance meets the improviser’s restless search. Years of exploring jazz standards honed his ability to carve outside the edges, seeking undiscovered pathways and unimagined destinations in even the most familiar forms. Through his playing, David also reaches further back, seeking connection with his African ancestry. The music becomes a way of stitching together lineages: European, African, and American, converging in a present moment that transcends all borders.
At the center of this work is David himself: a quiet, Zen-like presence, deeply attuned to the subtle energy of the room, the silence between notes, and the shifting spirits of his listeners. His music is not performed at you but with you—an invitation to travel together across time, memory, and imagination.
There is nothing contrived in his playing. No ornament for ornament’s sake. It is startlingly honest. Each phrase is a step into the unknown, yet it feels inevitable, as though it could not have unfolded any other way. Listening to David is less like attending a concert and more like entering a ceremony. His performances unfold like an ayahuasca journey — immersive, unpredictable, and profoundly cathartic. As a musical shaman, he guides listeners through shadow and light, turbulence and stillness, until the music delivers them to new ground. What arises can unearth buried emotions, release long-held tensions, and open radiant vistas of sound and silence. His concerts are not recitals but rituals of listening: honest, unadorned, and deeply human.
What emerges is not display, but surrender: to the moment, to silence, to what lies beyond his own grasp. In this surrender, he becomes a vessel, and in his music, we hear not only the piano, not only the past, but something greater—something that can’t be named, only experienced.
