Chad Lawson

Pianist and composer Chad Lawson’s performing career has visited byways of various musical genres, and through it all, his own musical voice has evolved into an intimate, expressive one that had him topping streaming and sales charts in the 2010s and found his music placed in several TV shows and commercial projects.
As a five-year-old kid, Lawson wanted music lessons after seeing Sha Na Na on TV. As is typical, those lessons turned out to be mostly classically oriented piano ones. When it came time to go to college, he applied to the Peabody Conservatory, but decided to focus on jazz and attended Berklee College of Music instead, where he also picked up studio keyboard gigs. After graduation, he ended up touring with Babik Reinhardt, and then formed his own jazz trio with Zack Page on bass and Al Sergel on drums. The Trio’s self-titled debut album was released in 1997, followed by two more on the Summit label — Dear Dorothy: The Oz Sessions (2002) and Unforeseen (2004) — which did well on jazz charts. Dear Dorothy led to Lawson’s music being used on the TV show Dawson’s Creek and in Starbucks stores, and to his scoring Doughboys (Louis Lombardi, 2007). Lawson and the trio then took a break while he toured as keyboardist with Julio Iglesias in 2007.
William Ackerman, Windham Hill’s founder, had taken an interest in Lawson’s music, and helped launch Lawson’s first solo album, Set on a Hill, in 2009. It marked a new direction for Lawson’s career as five more solo projects appeared between 2011 and 2014, each earning editorial recognition from organizations including Amazon, CDBaby, Reviews New Age, NPR, and Spain’s RTVE.
Lawson’s solo work has a relaxed, meditative feel that draws on both the sonorities of classical music and the freeform nature of jazz improv. The feel of his music became even more intimate with The Space Between (2013), where he altered the sound of the piano by placing extra felt between the hammers and strings and placing the microphone close to the hammers. He used those same modifications in 2014 for his chart topping The Chopin Variations, based on the Romantic composer’s melodies, which also featured violinist Judy Kang and cellist Rubin Kodheli. This was followed by the solo album Bach Interpreted in 2016, and scores for the podcast and Amazon TV series Lore, a confirmation of what was already recognized by producers for The Walking Dead and Viceland, and by ad agencies for Chevrolet, IBM, and others: his music easily helped set the tone for their projects. In 2018, Lawson released re:Piano, this time processing the sound of his piano through tools available on an iPad, just as he does when live looping in concert, and again topping streaming and sales lists. Lawson’s scores for the first two seasons of the original podcast, Unobscured, saw release in 2019, followed in 2020 by the EP Stay. ~ Patsy Morita