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Schreurs
Born May 23. 1966, Dirk Schreurs started improvising at the piano at the age of 6. Having taken a solid classical training at the Music Academy of Neerpelt (Flanders, Belgium), he graduated summa cum laude.
At the age of 15 he sat in with R&B-giants such as Bob Hall, Dave Peabody and the Deluxe Blues Band at the Belgian Folk & Blues festival, playing ragtime, blues, boogie- woogie and gospel piano. At the European Youth Music Festival (1984) the Dutch Television (NOS) recorded Dirk's performance of the jazz-musical "On the town" scored by Leonard Bernstein.
In 1989 Dirk graduated as a Master in Germanic Philology at the Catholic University of Louvain. For three years he worked as a scientific researcher in the field of Computational Linguistics at the Linguistics Department of the Louvain Faculty of Arts. He gave lectures on the development of "Controlled Language" at the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh (Scotland) and at the Institute of Science and Technology of the Manchester University (UK). The syntactic and the semantic aspects of linguistics and improvised music have always been two major points of interest in the development of his compositional craftmanship and improvising skills.
Moreover, over the years Dirk crossed the path of great musicians such as Kenny Werner, Enrico Pieranunzi, Bob Berg, Trilok Gurtu, John Abercrombie, Joey deFrancesco, Jack de Johnette, Martial Solal, Daniel Goyonne, Reggie Washington, Gene Lake, David Gilmore, and David Kikoski, all of whom - through their inspiring teachings, performances and talks - gave spiritual direction to Dirk's dynamic approach to jazz and improvised music.
He has composed and arranged over 250 tunes, many of which have found their way not only to the performing stage but also to the realm of radio and television around Western Europe. Dirk also received three SABAM for Culture jazz composition prizes in 2001, 2002 and 2013. What's more, he composed the music to a unique video installation by Argentinian visual artist Marta Graciela Bressi. This art project called Minds of Glass was shown at internationally renowned film and art festivals in Buenos Aires, Los Angeles and New York in 2009. In 2015 he composed “12: the Prophet – The Zodiac – the SIgnatures”, a cycle of 12 numerological “Berlin, School of Electronic Music”-style sonic miniatures celebrating the beauty of the Zodiac. In 2018 he founded the Association for Holistic, Imaginative and Mindful Sonic Art (AHIMSA) and released the ambient/electro CD #1 featuring co-synthesist Diederik Wissels. In 2019 Dirk started recording a series of contemporary acoustic Solo Piano Works. Moreover, he founded a new quartet, featuring Ron van Stratum on drums, Roman Korolik on bass and Costa Arvanitidis on guitar, playing his original jazz-funk compositions.
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