Lennart Smidt
 // pianist, improviser, composer, music producer based in Berlin.

Current projects are SOLO and GROUP concerts.

short bio

As a place where creativity meets groove and spirit, where improv meets composition, jazz became the acoustic playground after growing up around classial music.
Improvisation always plays a key role for telling the musical stories of the moment.
This work manifests both in recordings and unique live shows.

photo by Dovile Sermoka

First piano solo album Boomerang in 2025.
First jazz ensemble EP Take.Off in 2016.

After returning to Germany in 2019, Smidt’s piano compositions were commissioned for the mixed media projects Bauhaus-Expedition and 100 Saiten Beuys in 2022.
“Magnetic Layers” for solo piano + live effects had been commissioned in 2018.

During the pandemic in 2021, he led the production of Rüdiger Bierhorst album "Im Zentrum des Kreisels" as producer/arranger/sounddesigner, summing up the German singer-songwriter’s latest work.

Though mainly jazz-pianist, interdisciplinary work had started 2015 with experimental opera and performances (”After the Flood”, “Forgotten Matters”) together with film director Bernardo Zanotta on festivals in Groningen, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Nantes.
It continued in Berlin with workshops by the late Tristan Honsinger, and co-hosting the curated multidisciplinary improv jam “big bouncing charlie”.

Between 2012-2020, Lennart Smidt Trio played in different combinations, such as 2019 with Benson Itoe (ebass, Cameroon/Groningen) and Yusuf Ahmed (drums, London).

Smidt’s workshop and teaching concept Jazz as creative community music conveys a healthy way of learning music, that very much adapts to individual levels and experience of students. This workshop for fellow pianists and teachers focuses on how to play un-written music, accompany songs, and the basic thinking concepts behind Jazz and Improvised Music, outside scale-based vertical approaches.

Currently teaching piano at University of Hildesheim.

shared stages with Yusuf Ahmed, John Winston Berta, Marcello Busato, Giuseppe Doronzo, Paul Engelmann, Esat Ekincioglu, Johannes Fink, Willi Hanne, Benson Itoe, Julie Mbodje, Liedfett, Hiske Oosterwijk, Aleks Skoric, Lucas Uecker, Yelmur, Kussi Weiss, ...