Theresa Chen and Drew Serafini perform selected chamber works for guitar and piano.
Theresa Chen, D.M.A., is an active, well-rounded musician. She is an improvising keyboardist, accompanist, composer/arranger, pedagogue, and Catholic music minister.
Dr. Chen currently serves as an assistant professor of jazz studies at Texas A&M University–Kingsville (TAMUK). She is the first Taiwanese-American to teach jazz full-time at a music college in the United States. She also has given clinics, lectures, and masterclasses around Taiwan and America. Her first jazz album, Whispering to God, was released digitally in December 2021 and physically in July 2022. The album’s title track was nominated in the Best Jazz Tune category of the 2022 Golden Indie Music Awards in Taiwan. Dr. Chen was also nominated in the top 8 for the People’s Choice—Artist/Band category of the 2023 Syracuse Area Music Awards.
Dr. Chen has shared the stage with famous jazz artists such as Gary Smulyan, Ingrid Jensen, Dave Liebman, Bria Skonberg, Boris Kozlov, Victor Provost, Allison Miller, and Scott Wendholt. She is devoted to a series of performance projects on women jazz instrumentalists, historical improvisations, jazz in Asia, pedagogical methods of jazz/commercial music theory/history, and jazz music applied in Christian liturgies. She is also preparing for the release of her second jazz album featuring all original compositions, Not Afraid.
Her works can be found on her website: www.theresachenjazpiano.com.
Drew Serafini has been an active professional musician, composer, arranger, and music instructor for over 15 years. Earning his B.M. in Classical Guitar Performance from Ithaca College in the early 2010s, he has since performed music in a wide variety of genres, from rock, R&B, blues, and folk before settling into his true love, jazz, in themid-2010s. In 2022, he released his first album Introspection digitally on various streaming platforms and plans to follow it up by the end of 2023.
