Jeffrey Benatar

Benatar earned his MA at the world’s only Jazz History and Research Program at Rutgers-Newark, The State University of New Jersey.  He received a 2013 Graduate Student Excellence Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement.  He was awarded a Department of Arts, Culture, and Media Grant which helped him to travel to the 2012 Leeds International Jazz Education Conference to present a Jazz Theory paper on a Herbie Hancock transcription.  He was a 2012 Institute of Jazz Studies Morroe Berger-Benny Carter Jazz Research Fund Recipient in recognition of his excellent research on Uri Caine and His Jewishly Influenced Music.

Benatar studied with Dr. Lewis Porter, Dr. Henry Martin and Dr. John Howland, and he was a Lecturer for the Fundamentals of Music course at Rutgers-Newark.  He was a member of Professor Stanley Cowell’s Jazz Piano Studio at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers-New Brunswick.  Benatar also interned in the Education Department and the Wynton Marsalis Enterprise Department of Jazz At Lincoln Center.

Benatar was the first Jazz Piano Performance student at The Ohio State University to graduate with Honors.  He studied piano with Mark Flugge; academic instructors included Dr. Ted McDaniel, Professor Shawn “Thunder” Wallace, Kenyatta Beasley, Jim Masters and Tim Cummiskey.  Benatar won the 2009 Dachsteiner Scholarship for Most Valuable Player in The Ohio State University’s Jazz Ensemble.  He was selected by the Jazz Arts Group to play the part of Duke Ellington with the Ohio Youth Jazz Orchestra at the 2010 Parma (Italy) Jazz Festival.  Benatar was the founder and president of the Jazz Club at OSU.  In 2007, he won the Hank Marr Award for the most outstanding high school jazz soloist in the state of Ohio, performing Stan Kenton’s “Intermission Riff” as a guest artist with the Columbus Jazz Orchestra.

For more information, please visit Jeff Benatar’s website at http://jeffbenatar.blogspot.com/.


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