The first day of my eighth grade, I remember it very clearly. One of my classmates invited me over to his house and he said, “Hey let’s go listen to some records.” He played Thelonious Monk’s “Blue Monk” . . . . I thought I had died and gone to Heaven.
Luke Gillespie studied classical piano at the Osaka College of Music in Japan from age 8 to 18. At IU, he studied jazz with David Baker and classical piano with Michel Block and Leonard Hokanson.
Gillespie has performed with Bruce Bransby, the Buselli-Wallarab Jazz Orchestra, Sylvia McNair, Dan Perantoni, Dominic Spera, Wanda Stafford, Arturo Sandoval, and the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, among many others.