Chris Galvan Bio
Christopher Galvan began classical guitar studies at the age of 5 and jazz studies at the age of 15. Christopher graduated with honors from Berklee College of Music in 1997. While at Berklee, he studied jazz performance and composition. Christopher has written and recorded for film, radio, television, and digital media.
Christopher has studied guitar with Mick Goodrich, Jon Damien, and Garrison Fewell,and composition and counterpoint with renowned Yugoslavian composer Vuk Kulenovic. From these diverse influences, Christopher has developed a unique compositional and improvisational style that reflects the newest and most cutting- edge concepts in modern jazz and modern classical music. Christopher has led groups and performed with groups that have contained many extraordinary musicians. With the Christopher Galvan Trio for example, Christopher sought to use the guitar as a larger instrument than it is normally considered,to replace the incomparable piano. This group played with a dangerous, explorative intensity not generally heard in a jazz guitar trio. With the extraordinary Steve Koch on drums, and the spiritual virtuosity of the late Chris Penzimer on bass, Christopher further developed his free playing concepts. The goal was to play "beyond the changes" and to sink into the primal essence of what the music was composed to convey.Christopher continues to perform and work with many world-class jazz artists and visual artists locally, nationally, and internationally. Christopher performs solo concerts for art galleries along the eastern U.S. and abroad, each time creating a special performance program to reflect the spirit of the artist's work and mood of the room. Christopher is also one half of the 'Instinctive Belief" duet with saxophonist Zulfugar Baghirov. This group's goal is to create pure, improvised music with a focus on spiritual enlightenment, intellectual concept,and beauty of spirit. Instinctive Belief attempts to transcend the technical aspects of music education, in particular jazz study, from which both members have evolved and to further expand the post-bop vocabulary by bringing in concepts from other disciplines, in particular the modern classical.
