about
Pianist, singer, songwriter and composer Adrianne Duncan has been making music since the age of six. The daughter of renowned classical guitarist and Clark Atlanta University professor Charles Duncan (author of The Art of Classical Guitar Playing and A Modern Approach to Classical Guitar), she honed her classical piano skills through private study, master classes with such luminaries as Murray Perahia, Leon Fleisher, Emanuel Ax and Ruth Laredo, and summers spent at Tanglewood and Brevard Music Centers. A Georgia native, she toured throughout the Southeast with her father and was the pianist for the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra for four years under the baton of Maestro Jere Flint, winning their concerto competition to perform Schumann’s Concerto in A minor, Op. 54 in Atlanta Symphony Hall. She attended Northwestern University on a music scholarship, studying with piano department chair David Kaiserman, and is the winner of numerous piano competitions and awards.
Now based in Los Angeles, Adrianne has performed in venues in the United States, Europe and South America. She has played and recorded with globally recognized musicians, including on both albums of the Grammy-nominated Lado B Brazilian Project, with whom she toured Brazil on keyboards and vocals. She has played keyboard instruments and sung on numerous recordings (including The Jazz Chamber with legendary multireedist Bennie Maupin) and was the musical director of the new musical Twins for its premiere in Berlin. Also a producer and arranger, her projects include albums for actor-singers Jacqueline Emerson (The Hunger Games) and Larry Wolf (Pound, Putney Swope). Her voice and piano playing can be heard on film and television soundtracks including the Emmy-nominated musical episode of The L Word: Generation Q, God’s Country with Thandiwe Newton and Sanctuary with Margaret Qualley. She was actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s piano coach for the titular role in the feature film Belle and appears as herself in renowned performance artist Marina Abramovic’s documentary 512 Hours.
Adrianne’s project Gullah Meditations, a reimagining of rare Gullah Geechee spirituals with GRAMMY®-nominated tenor Victor Ryan Robertson (Metropolitan Opera, Royal Albert Hall, Kennedy Center), has taken the duo to venues as diverse as the historic Morton Theatre in Athens, Georgia; Penn Center, a National Historic Landmark District on St. Helena Island, South Carolina; Greenwich House, a 120-year-old continuously operating music facility in New York City; and independent company Victory Hall Opera in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the project was presented in a staged version with Alvin Ailey dancer Fana Minea Tesfagiorgis and directed by Miriam Gordon-Stewart. With generous grants from the University of Georgia, the Boeing Company and Penn Center, the project will next undergo a series of workshops with Opera Parallèle in San Francisco.
Adrianne also performs with her seven-person a cappella vocal improvisation collective Fish To Birds at such Los Angeles venues as Blue Whale, Catalina Jazz Club, REDCAT at Disney Hall and Skirball Cultural Center. She has an extensive acting background and has appeared in numerous plays, films, commercials and television shows, starring opposite venerable character actor Seymour Cassel in the thriller The Chameleon. She is the founder and producer of LA Modern Jazz Series, a concert series featuring world-class creative jazz musicians, and is the vocal contractor for Joy Music House.
