BIOGRAPHY | DMITRY BAEVSKY
The only son of a writer and a translator, he grew up in St Petersburg surrounded by books and started piano lessons at the age of six. However, he discovered his passion and seriousness for music as a teenager only when he picked up an alto saxophone. Although Dmitry was not surrounded by professional musicians, his family was closely connected to music. His great grand-father, Moisei Beregovsky, was one of the most famous and respected Jewish ethnomusicologists who spent his life gathering melodies and words of Yiddish folk songs, as well as Eastern European Jewish dance melodies (Klezmer music).
Dmitry entered the Mussorgsky College of Music in St-Petersburg when he was 15 and studied for four years with the brilliant Russian jazz saxophonist Gennady Goldstein.
When he turned 19, Baevsky auditioned to join the Jazz Department at the New School University in New York and was granted a full scholarship. He therefore left Russia to settle in the USA. As he was finishing college, Baevsky was already a member of the New York jazz community and decided to settle permanently.
He released his first album as a leader in 2005 with “Introducing Dmitry Baevsky” (Lineage Records). The album features such masters as Cedar Walton and Jimmy Cobb.
Since then, Baevsky has performed and/or recorded with musicians such as Benny Green, Peter Washington, Willie Jones III, David Hazeltine, "Killer" Ray Appleton, Peter Bernstein, Cedar Walton, Dennis Irwin, Jeremy Pelt, Steve Williams, Joe Magnarelli, Ryan Kisor...
In 2009, he recorded “Some Other Spring” (Rideau Rouge / Harmonia Mundi) while on tour in Europe with the great guitarist Joe Cohn.
In September 2010, the label Sharp Nine Records released “Down With It”, an album featuring trumpet player Jeremy Pelt as well as Jeb Patton (p), David Wong (b) and Jason Brown (dr). The recording stayed more than four months in the Jazzweek charts (a weekly report of the top fifty Jazz recordings played on radio stations across the United States and Canada).
His second release on Sharp Nine Records, called “The Composers”, came out in 2012 and features David Hazeltine on piano, John Webber on bass, Jason Brown on drums and the great guitarist Peter Bernstein on three tracks.
2015 marks his debut on the label Jazz Family with “Over and Out”, a trio album recorded in New York with bassist David Wong and drummer Joe Strasser.