Live, local, and improvised: Dan Greenleaf’s jazz recording debut
May 15, 2025 | By Alex McPhedran | Community News Service
Dan Greenleaf plays guitar at Future Fields Studios in Burlington on April 16. Photo by Alex McPhedran
Dan Greenleaf carries a musical pedigree steeped in local influence. With his upcoming debut album, the 24-year-old from Waterbury wants to bring a new, communal approach to jazz in the Green Mountain State.
Greenleaf releases his album, “Live at Ford Hall,” on May 16 and half the proceeds from its Bandcamp release will go toward Green Mountain Adaptive Sports, an organization he’s been skiing with for most of his life.
Born with cerebral palsy, Greenleaf has crafted a personal style where limitation becomes a “jumping off point” for creative expression.
“Living with disability forces you to really develop heightened problem-solving skills. Every moment requires extra attention and an ability to adapt – my music reflects this perspective,” Greenleaf explains. It has also helped develop what he calls “tenacity” (while his loved ones call it “stubbornness”). “I’ve always found ways to participate in parts of life that I maybe should have stayed away from,” he said.
Album cover art by Dan Greenleaf & Eric Maeir
“Live at Ford Hall” is a flowing, nebulous presentation of Greenleaf’s musical identity. Much of that identity, he said, is shaped by a reverence for the live, social energy of music improvised by a group.
“I really am into conversation, you know, like reaction, playing with people that are sensitive so that the moment is so cool,” he said. “Because it's like, this could never happen again, and it’s never happened before.”
Greenleaf recorded the album live at Ithaca College’s Ford Hall in April 2024, as his time studying there was drawing to a close. As a music student at the college, he had been tasked with organizing and presenting a senior recital. He did not want it to take the form of others he had seen.
“I didn’t want to do the thing that was like, talk about a song for five minutes, play it, talk about another song for five minutes, play it,” Greenleaf said. “More power for the people that like that, but for me, it’s like I’m trying to have a cohesive musical experience.”
Across the album, you hear all the elements of a classic jazz quintet. There’s Nick Peloso on upright bass, Drew Martin on saxophone, Theo Lobo on drums, Robert Irvin on keyboards and, of course, Greenleaf on guitar.
Under Greenleaf’s direction, their music on the album is characterized by broad dynamic shifts. The instruments move between tonal centers and motifs as if every section and idea had been written out beforehand.
Some of the songs on the tracklist were almost fully improvised live by the band that night. “Bite Bullet” was built around only a short musical “cell,” as Greenleaf calls it, that he brought to the group. Instead of delineating specific sections and a path for the tune to take, he allowed the emotions and ideas of the musicians present to guide the song’s direction.
For him, “the ‘Bite Bullet’ thing was kind of an exercise for me to compose something beautiful with as much space as I could possibly put in it.”
Beyond being his musical collaborators, the other musicians on stage were some of his closest friends.
“It’s all some of my best friends that I had lived with for years,” he said. “Because my band members are some of my best friends, and they know me, and they’ve known me for a while, they kind of knew what I was going for with this music.”
Greenleaf cites many sources as essential to his musical growth. He studied with the late music teacher Allen Church of Morrisville from age 6 to age 18. From Church, Greenleaf learned a “true and honest love for music.”
He attended Harwood Union High School, where he played in the school’s assembly band and learned from teachers Bruce Sklar and Chris Rivers, who both retired in 2023 after decades helping guide the school’s acclaimed music programs.
Playing in the Harwood band, Greenleaf learned how to lead a group and “shape a band which I’m a part of into something beautiful.”
He graduated from high school in 2019. Soon he would head to Ithaca, where he studied with Director of Jazz Studies Mike Titlebaum, whom he now describes as a close friend.
Dan Greenleaf's debut recording, "Live at Ford Hall," is out this month and will support Green Mountain Adaptive Sports. Photo by Alex McPhedran
Of his mentorship, Greenleaf says: “It always felt to me like he noticed what my thing was about, like my musical voice or identity, and he just found ways to encourage and also challenge it.”
Titlebaum spoke in an interview about Greenleaf’s musicianship.
“One of the things that makes Dan unique is that I feel like he knows why he makes music more than almost anyone else I’ve ever worked with,” Titlebaum said. “He just wants to make music with other people for other people.”
Titlebaum echoed Greenleaf’s sentiment about the spontaneous, collaborative quality of the music on the album.
“On many levels, what you’re hearing in this performance is that moment in time,” he said. “This is what happened this year, this week, this day. It represents the culmination of years of becoming friends with the bandmates, roommates, playing music, you know — where he was at that moment in time.”
Greenleaf points to the music educators in his life as inspiration for his career and motivation for him to have a hand in shaping new musical talent as well. To that end, he has a private lesson studio and has taught at Eastern U.S. Music Camp and Burlington Technical Center. He also helps lead the recording studio and arts community Future Fields in Burlington.
After the album releases, Greenleaf and his band, the Dan Greenleaf Organization, will play at Stowe Cider on May 23, Radio Bean in Burlington on May 24, and the Phoenix Gallery in Waterbury on May 25 — and continue creating their live, social sound.
UVM’s Community News Service is a journalism internship that provides community newspapers with reporting, including the Waterbury Roundabout.
See a recent Times Argus feature on Dan Greenleaf online here.