Kenny Werner
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Kenny Werner has been a world-class pianist and composer for over forty years. His prolific output of compositions, recordings, and publications continues to impact audiences worldwide. In 1996 he wrote his landmark book Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within.
Werner has since created videos, lectured worldwide, and authored many articles on how musicians, artists, or even business people can allow their “master creator” within to lift their performance to its highest level, showing us how to be spontaneous, fearless, joyful and disciplined in our work and our life.
Kenny was awarded the 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship Award for his seminal work, No Beginning No End. No Beginning No End is a musical journey exploring tragedy and loss, death and transition, and the path from one lifetime to the next. Utilizing over 70 musicians, Kenny’s third album for Half Note Records is an expansive composition featuring Joe Lovano, Judy Silvano, Wind Ensemble, Choir and String Quartet.
Born in Brooklyn, NY on November 19, 1951 and then growing up in Oceanside, Long Island, Kenny began playing and performing at a young age, first recording on television at the age of 11. Although he studied classical piano as a child, he enjoyed playing anything he heard on the radio. In high school and his first years of college, he attended the Manhattan School of Music as a classical piano major.
Becoming the Instrument
Kenny Werner has been a world-class pianist, composer, and teacher for 40 years. In 2010, Werner received the Guggenheim Fellowship Award for his seminal work, “No Beginning No End,” a musical journey exploring tragedy and loss, death and transition, and the path from one lifetime to the next.
Now he has coalesced his knowledge into Becoming the Instrument, the highly anticipated sequel to his landmark book, Effortless Mastery, which revolutionized how musicians approach their craft.
In Becoming the Instrument, Werner shares how anyone can experience mastery, drawn from his experience as a musical master. It’s the guide for seeing the highest in oneself and others.
This new book is for anyone who wants to understand the fine art of mastery and how it applies to their own life. He brilliantly yet simply expresses how to lift one’s perceptions from the mundane to a higher plane and does it with a sense of humor.
The next level is attainable.
“Mastery is not perfection, or even virtuosity. It is giving oneself love, forgiving one’s mistakes, and not allowing earthly evidence to diminish one’s view of oneself as a drop in the Ocean of Perfection.” ‒ Kenny Werner
Kenny's Info
243 episodes