BIOGRAPHY

Pioneers in the use of four-hands piano in jazz, Stephanie Trick and Paolo Alderighi have earned widespread success with their arrangements of classics from the stride piano, ragtime, and boogie woogie traditions, as well as from the Swing Era. In recent projects, they have focused on the repertoire of the Golden Age of Broadway and Hollywood, as the songs written for the musicals of the stage and screen represent a high point of creative ferment in American popular music.

Blending impeccable technique with mature musicality, the piano duo has performed in a variety of venues across the United States, Europe, and Asia (including the Gilmore Keyboard Festival, Jazz at Filoli, the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, the Kobe Jazz Street Festival in Japan, the London Jazz Festival, the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival, the Ascona Jazz Festival in Switzerland, the Silkeborg Riverboat Jazz Festival in Denmark, the Bohém Ragtime & Jazz Festival in Hungary, the Milan Conservatory, Teatro Dal Verme Milano, Jazzland in Vienna, and the Jazz Bistro in Toronto), winning the acclaim of critics and fans alike.

Stephanie Trick (from St. Louis), a leading exponent of stride piano, and Paolo Alderighi (from Milan), one of Italy’s foremost jazz pianists, met at a piano festival in Switzerland in 2008. Soon after, they started to collaborate on a four-hands piano project and have recorded six albums together. Trick and Alderighi explored the formula of four-hands duets on one piano, rarely used in jazz, in their first two albums, Two for One (2012) andSentimental Journey (2014). Their partnership continued with Double Trio Live 2015 and Double Trio Always (2016), recorded in the piano trio setting, but with two pianists instead of one. In 2018, they released their first album on two pianos, Broadway and More. Their latest project is a double album, I Love Erroll, I Love James P. (2020), and it features the compositions of two legendary figures of jazz piano, Erroll Garner and James P. Johnson.

Trick and Alderighi’s touring schedule includes performances in schools and universities, as they believe in the importance of educational outreach. Their programs range from lectures and concert lessons to master classes for students of all ages, with a focus on various topics, such as “A Short History of the Piano,” “Intersections of Jazz and Classical Music,” “Early American Popular Music and the Birth of Jazz,” “Women in Ragtime and Jazz,” “Musical Improvisation,” “Blues and Boogie Woogie,” “Ragtime and Stride Piano,” and “How to Appreciate Jazz.”

Both Stephanie Trick and Paolo Alderighi have a background in classical piano. Trick graduated cum laude from the University of Chicago with a Bachelor of Arts in Music. Alderighi has a degree in Piano Performance from the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan, Italy, and also graduated cum laude from Bocconi University in Management of Arts, Culture and Communication. Since 2008, he has been teaching a course at Bocconi entitled “Critical Approaches to the Arts - Music and Society.”

They have worked with a variety of institutions, including the following: the Eastman School of Music, the University of Mississippi, the Colburn School (Los Angeles), the University of Santa Barbara, Syracuse University, Tri-North Middle School and Templeton Elementary School (Bloomington, Indiana), Tokyo Nihon University, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Bocconi University (Milan), and others.

“I love to hear Stephanie and Paolo together. They are an inspiration. Such sympatico! Such back-and-forth! Individually they are marvelous musicians—we’ve known that, but together they play 4-handed stride as it’s never been done. Brava, bravo!”

– Dick Hyman

"It is unusual to hear a piano duet that is played by four hands on just one piano. Somehow Stephanie Trick and Paolo Alderighi manage this near-impossible feat without getting in each other’s way. Their playing is very complementary and mutually inspiring with plenty of fireworks being felt along the way. In their individual careers and together in this collaboration, Paolo and Stephanie keep the rich legacies of ragtime, stride piano, and swing alive, fresh and creative. Their CD is a joy from start to finish.”

– Scott Yanow

“Stephanie and Paolo, revel in a gorgeous lightness of being on a beautiful assortment of songs, tempos, and approaches”

– Michael Steinman