Angelica Sanchez

Pianist and composer Angelica Sanchez has established herself as a daring jazz conceptualist whose work fuses post-bop, modern creative, and avant-garde idioms into an exploratory whole. Her recording career opened with the 2003 release Mirror Me, after which she pursued projects across duo, trio, and quintet formats that encompass Life Between from 2008 alongside Tony Malaby, Twine Forest from 2013 with Wadada Leo Smith, and the 2020 pairing How to Turn the Moon with Marilyn Crispell. In 2022 she issued the trio recording Sparkle Beings featuring Michael Formanek and Billy Hart.

Sanchez entered the world in Phoenix, Arizona, during 1972 and took up the piano while still a child; by adolescence she had already developed into a skilled improviser. After completing studies in piano and composition at Arizona State University she relocated to New York in 1995 and later obtained a master’s degree in arranging at William Paterson University. The same quartet that appeared on her 2003 debut Mirror Me—saxophonist Tony Malaby, bassist Michael Formanek, and drummer Tom Rainey—marked her first statement as a leader, while additional associations have included Susie Ibarra, Tim Berne, Nicole Mitchell, Rob Mazurek, Ben Goldberg, Mark Dresser, Greg Tardy, and Ben Monder.

Between 2008 and 2017 she issued multiple albums on Clean Feed Records, among them Life Between once more with Malaby and Rainey plus guitarist Marc Ducret and bassist Drew Gress, the solo-piano disc A Little House, Wires & Moss that reunited her with Malaby, Ducret, Gress, and Rainey, and the trio set Float the Edge recorded with Formanek and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. Further joint efforts from the period comprise the 2013 trumpet-and-piano encounter Twine Forest with Wadada Leo Smith and the 2020 duo album How to Turn the Moon with Marilyn Crispell.

Her achievements have been recognized with a 2008 French/American Chamber Music America grant, the 2011 Rockefeller Brothers Pocantico Artist Residency, and the 2021 Civitella Fellowship in Italy. Outside her performing schedule she serves on the faculties of both The New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music and Princeton University. Two additional trio projects appeared in 2022: Huapango, again with Malaby and Rainey, and Sparkle Beings with Formanek and drummer Billy Hart.