Biography
James Posedel is a bandleader, educator, performer, and piano technician in Asheville, North Carolina
James is a full-time piano enthusiast. He owns and operates Posey Piano Tuning, a full-service piano tuning and re-building workshop in Asheville. He has traveled the country performing with swing ensembles, jazz groups, big bands, and as a solo stride piano player. He has taught piano lessons for 19 years and maintains that helping a student learn how to improvise is one of life’s biggest joys.
James has found a meaningful delight in exploring, studying, and preserving the improvisational styles of niche personalities from the swing-era. He transcribes, arranges, and records music that breathes today like it did 100 years ago. He has studied the musical approaches of Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, James P Johnson, Jellyroll Morton, and Lil Hardin Armstrong and has consorted to arrange music in their likeness. His improvisation reaches for the communal thread that connects these titans - - a shared vocabulary that is wielded with intention to communicate kaleidoscopic emotion via a simple and polite invitation to listen.
James earned his M.S. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Western Carolina University. He has a B.A. in Psychology and Spanish from Appalachian State University.
James is the resident piano tuner for the Biltmore Estate, Echo Mountain Recording Studio, Antidote and the Crow and Quill in Asheville. You have heard his tuning work on the radio, you just didn’t know it! In his spare time, James is making a coffee table book that features all of the quirky objects he has pulled out of pianos.
You can hear James perform regularly at the Biltmore Inn, Antidote, the NC Arboretum, and Chicora Alley.
