Chicagoan of the Year for Jazz: Jahari Stampley, the 24-year-old pianist who wowed Herbie Hancock, is just getting started

Jahari Stampley keeps coming back to one word to describe the past couple months: “crazy.”

As in, it’s crazy that the 24-year-old born and raised in Austin made it into the prestigious Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz’s International Competition at all, much less won: he was on tour and nearly forgot to submit his application. It’s crazy that, when he did submit it, he technically missed the deadline; he’d had to remotely coach his mother through uploading the correct files to the application portal, since he couldn’t do it over his crummy airplane Wi-Fi.

Later, in the same barrage of texts congratulating him on progressing to the finals, Stampley learned his beloved friend and mentor — Quindrey “Drey” Davis, a Spokane, Washington-based drummer — had died of cancer. Stampley dedicated his winning set to Davis: an original, “Prelude En’Trance,” and John Hicks’ “After the Morning.” Stampley’s emotional performance was such a blur that when Hancock crowned him the winner, the young pianist misunderstood and thought he’d gotten third place, not first.

“I was just letting out so much: all of my frustrations, all of everything. It was a whirlwind of ideas and things, but my mind was blank,” Stampley says.

Working one’s own composition into their competition set, as Stampley did, is “daring,” says Herbie Hancock Institute president Tom Carter. The risk more than paid off. Now, Hancock counts himself among Stampley’s slack-jawed admirers.

“I’ve had the opportunity to hear some of the best pianists in the world throughout the years. In a sense, he really challenges them,” Hancock said in a recent interview. “I’ve never heard anybody play quite like that … I was thinking, ‘Maybe I should study with him.’”

If Hancock and the competition judges thought Stampley sounded like no one else, they’re onto something. Stampley’s path to the piano is pretty, well, crazy. Music was always around, but never compulsory. His mother, D-Erania Stampley, is an instrumental polymath who runs a music school in Maywood; his younger sister Jayla and father Steve are hobbyist musicians. Stampley started on drums but got curious about the keyboard at 14, when he stumbled upon a Coldplay cover by P. Miller, a pianist on YouTube. He had never seen a pianist that reminded him so much of himself: young, bespectacled, Black. Miller’s videos were filmed over his shoulder, with a clear shot of his hands.

Just pressing buttons, Stampley thought. I can do that.

Stampley studied Miller’s hands obsessively, then other pianists’. Later, he shocked his music teacher at Rickover Naval Academy by replicating a complicated passage he’d demonstrated the day before, not by ear but by sight. Without realizing it, Stampley had become an expert musical mimic, despite not knowing the first thing about theory. Improvisation and ear training came later, and just as easily: Stampley was accepted into the prestigious Manhattan School of Music and hit the road with bassist Stanley Clarke after graduating in 2021.

“It’s a weird trait of mine: When I’m curious about something, I don’t stop until I figure it out. Even if it took a whole year, I would just keep practicing the same motions, the same thing, over and over and over again,” Stampley says.

Coming to piano so late, and so unusually, has given Stampley a unique outlook on pedagogy. A few months ago, he launched Piano Chronicles, a phone game he conceived and designed with the help of a programmer in Pakistan. An even more sophisticated follow-up — an interactive online piano course, with transcriptions offered as gameplay rewards — will go live in the new year.

Stampley’s ability to be a one-man production company is dizzying. His debut record, 2023′s “Still Listening,” even features his own jacket art, his past and present selves serenely overlooking a sunset-tinted vista.

As for Stampley’s future? Gigs, obviously, keep cropping up; Stampley’s next hometown show, at City Winery on Jan. 25, features his “family trio” with D-Erania — playing bass, an instrument she only recently picked up — and Miguel Russell, a Manhattan School of Music classmate who’s become Stampley’s “favorite drummer in the world.”

He first test-drove “Prelude En’Trance” with that trio, at a “Still Listening” release show at Evanston SPACE. Playing alone to start, Stampley charged up and down the piano, his economical fingerwork cinching ever-tighter knots of sound. At one point, his wafting, right-hand tremolos seemed to consider slowing down.

Nope. Egged on by D-Erania and Russell, Stampley instead hurtled forward again, a blaze of virtuoso joy and boyish vigor. We’ll be sprinting after him for years to come.

Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.

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