Oscar Micheli is a Dominican jazz pianist, composer, arranger and teacher, born on 14 December 1972. He leads the Oscar Micheli Trio and has spent as much of his working life training other musicians as performing.

Leaving and coming back

He started studying young in Santo Domingo and left at the end of 1995 for Berklee, graduating in 1999 in jazz composition and arranging. The route out was the standard one for a Dominican jazz musician of his generation; the return was not. He came back and stayed.

He teaches at the Escuela Internacional de Música of the UNPHU and wrote the three volumes of Ear Training the university uses. He also taught harmony and improvisation at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música, and Dominican musicians a generation younger name him among their teachers.

The trio, and the trios after it

The best known line-up is piano, Guy Frómeta on drums and Luis “Luigi” Feliz on bass. He has since rebuilt it more than once, calling the newer version The New Trio, and has recorded in solo piano, duo, sextet and big-band formats as well.

The trio has played the South Florida Dominican Jazz Fest, the Casa de Teatro jazz festival, the Hudson River Jazz Fest in New York, the Indy Jazz Fest and the Dominican Republic Jazz Festival, on bills that have included Arturo Sandoval, Chucho Valdés, Giovanni Hidalgo, David Sánchez and Steve Khan.

Two records

Swimming Notes came out in 2004, arranged and produced by him and partly written by him, and it got radio play in the United States, Venezuela and parts of Europe — which for a Dominican jazz record is a long reach.

A New World followed in 2013: ten compositions of his own, Caribbean and world-music colour, acoustic playing set against synthesised sound. He describes each track as a musical and spiritual conversation, which is a large claim, and the record is built to carry it.

The session player’s other life

Alongside his own name he has worked as producer, arranger and player for Chichi Peralta, Xiomara Fortuna and Juan Luis Guerra, among others. That is the economy of jazz in a small country: the concert is the vocation and the sessions are the trade, and the same hands do both.

In 2017 the Dominican Republic gave him a lifetime achievement recognition at its International Jazz Day celebrations. He belongs to the group of players — with Josean Jacobo and others — who made it possible to say that there are Dominican musicians who play only jazz, which was not true a generation ago.