Profile · Greenfield, Wisconsin
Dan Nimmer
Jazz pianist; raised in Greenfield, Greenfield High class of 2000; Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Wynton Marsalis Quintet since 2005
$1 million+
Dan Nimmer has held the piano chair in Wynton Marsalis’s quintet and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra since 2005—the Greenfield kid who started on a hundred-year-old family upright and ended up the band’s homecoming pianist when Marsalis plays Milwaukee. The suburb is not in the solos. It is in the first instrument. Most bios put his 1982 birth in Milwaukee; he has said plainly that he grew up in Greenfield and graduated from Greenfield High School in 2000. The piano at home was a Hofner inherited from an aunt, out of tune, “kinda like thunder” a couple of octaves below middle C. He started by ear around age ten, took classical lessons with Barbara Bunge, then, at fifteen, jazz with Mark Davis at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. His parents drove him to Milwaukee clubs until he was sitting in; saxophonist Berkley Fudge became a mentor. He lasted two years at Northern Illinois, got busy on the Chicago scene, quit school, and moved to New York in January 2004. A year later Wess Anderson—subbing at a Brooklyn jam—recommended him to Marsalis. Nimmer played at Marsalis’s apartment around New Year 2005, joined the quintet in March, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in August, and has been the piano chair ever since. Father Jeff Nimmer, a hobby drummer, has said Dan heard his calling sitting on that honky-tonk bench. When the Journal Sentinel covered a Marsalis Milwaukee date in 2014, it still called him a Greenfield grad. The raise is the tie.