Dan Furman began playing piano and writing music at the age of 6 in Old Hickory, Tennessee (just outside of Nashville). He went on to study composition and jazz piano at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio.
At Oberlin, Dan fronted and wrote for the "Skymonks," an original "free" jazz group. Following school, he traveled to South America for a year, where he studied Latin music and played with “musica criolla” bands in Lima, Perú. In 1997. he moved to Atlanta and began playing with jazz and Latin groups around the city and state of Georgia.

In Atlanta, he founded World Mambo Mission, one of the city' s leading Latin Jazz and salsa groups, and was a member and composer in Ficciones , another original Latin jazz group. The groups produced several CDs and played in both the Atlanta Jazz Festival and the Montreaux-Atlanta Music Festival. While in Atlanta, Dan put together the first incarnation of the Primordial Jazz Funktet , a 5-6-piece jazz group that performs his original compositions and arrangements over funk, hip-hop and other urban grooves. The Funktet now plays around the New York City area.

Since moving to New York in April of 2003, Furman has performed solo or with jazz groups or dance bands at many venues around the city. He plays weekly as a vocal accompanist at Singers Forum and at the Lee Strasberg Institute.  Dan also plays regularly with New York Minute, a top contemporary dance and wedding band. The Dan Furman Trio plays regularly at Cleopatra’s Needle in Manhattan, and the Primordial Jazz Funktet released its first CD in January of 2009.

Dan began writing for music theater in the BMI Lehman Engels Musical Theater Workshop. He wrote a 10-minute musical with Owen Roberts that was performed at the 2005 Raw Impressions Festival in New York City. His songs and shows have been recognized and performed at BMI “Smokers,” at the Golden Fleece Composers Forum, the Byrdcliffe Art Colony in Woodstock, NY, and at the Algonquin Hotel “Salon” in midtown Manhattan. He is actively promoting his first full-length musical, “RIP!,” which is based loosely on Washington Irving’s short story, “Rip Van Winkle,” and to date has been given two staged readings in Manhattan.

Dan Furman | danfurman@aol.com | (c) 404 819-9726