Dan Tepfer

On November 15th 2025, I brought my brand-new project Natural Machines 2.0 to Carnegie Hall.

Had a lovely conversation with the great Thomas Morgan around his beautiful new album, Around You Is a Forest, which includes an algorithmic instrument he created called WOODS.

At the Village Vanguard, years ago, I made the following observation: jazz musicians used to wear sunglasses indoors in order to hide their bloodshot eyes, caused by taking heroin.

The Pythagorean Tetractys, or how multiplying by 2 & 3 gets you all the notes you need, with stops at the Pythagorean Comma and Equal Temperament along the way.

I sometimes disappear down a rabbit hole, and this one was deep.

Inventions / Reinventions, my new solo album, came out today on StorySound Records.

My first project of the 2020/21 pandemic was something I called #BachUpsideDown, an exploration of the sound of Bach’s music in chromatic inversion.

Something extraordinary happened to me in the spring of 2013.

Thanks to JazzTimes for inviting me to write this memoriam.

“Thanks” to the pandemic, I’ve spent much more time figuring out how to deal with video and live streaming than I ever thought I would.

At long last, I’m now offering my triad sculptures — the ones that I created while developing my Natural Machines project — for sale.

Ever since Five Pedals Deep, my trio record with Thomas Morgan and Ted Poor, came out in 2010, I’ve gotten a steady trickle of emails asking about a particular tune on it called Back Attya.

The great McCoy Tyner, giant of jazz, huge influence on me and countless others, died a week ago, on March 6th 2020.

Reading Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, which I love, I’m reminded of a realization I had a while ago: pure creativity is closely related to dreams — a mysterious place where new visions are somehow born.

In Bach’s Goldberg Variations, every third variation is a canon at an increasing interval.

The question, when performing, is: “Am I putting up with anything right now?

Two of my favorite jokes rarely get any laughs.

The Natural Machines album is out today, Saturday October 27th.

Form-wise, the Beatles’ Hey Jude is unusual.

(Cross-posted from WBGO.org.

I’ve got a little time off from touring so I’m cleaning house.

I left the movie theater last night, post-Birdman, intensely moved.

(Cross-posted from UCLA’s Ethnomusicological Review.

Lee Konitz will be turning 87 in October, and his long and distinguished career as one of the most singular saxophonists in jazz needs no introduction (but if you need one, it’s here).

When I got back home to Brooklyn from tour a couple days ago, one of the things I did was buy Logic Pro X, a big update to a music production app I’ve used for a long time.

I just got home from a five-week tour in Europe and finally have some time to do what I call research.

My dirty little secret is that I can be a pretty serious nerd sometimes.