About David

David Lee Joyner, Ph.D., has over forty years experience as a pianist, vocalist, composer, arranger, program producer, conductor, published scholar, public lecturer, and educator.

David has his own freelance music business, DLJ Music Services (formerly David Deacon-Joyner) (see the list of “Music Services” on that web page). He also teaches jazz piano through the Community Music Program at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. He is on the board of directors for the Tacoma/Seattle public radio station KNKX and is a “red badge” volunteer for the Living Stones Prison Congregation at the Washington Corrections Center in Shelton, Washington.

David grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, a city with a remarkable musical history and home to such legends as W. C. Handy, Jimmie Lunceford, Elvis Presley, Isaac Hayes, Al Green, and jazzmen such as Booker Little, George Coleman, Charles Lloyd, Phineas Newborn, Jr., Marvin Stamm, and David’s mentor, pianist James Williams.

David attended Hillcrest High School and was a member of the jazz band, The Norsemen, one of the finest high school jazz bands of its day, winning second place at the 1971 Montreux (Switzerland) Jazz Festival and first place at the 1974 Mobile (Alabama) national jazz festival. The band toured Romania for three weeks in 1973. During this time, David honed his skills as a pianist, composer/arranger, bandleader, and record producer.

He earned his Bachelors degree in composition from the University of Memphis, studying piano and composition from Donald Freund. He earned a Masters degree in composition from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, studying with Jonathan Kramer. As a graduate assistant at CCM, David wrote arrangements for the UC marching band (sharing duties with composer (then fellow student) Randol Bass, assisted Frank Brown with directing the jazz band, and teaching jazz history as part of the new jazz studies major. He returned to Memphis to earn his PhD in musicology, specializing in music of the southern United States. During this time, he continued to direct college jazz ensembles, teach the jazz history course (as part of U of M’s new jazz studies major program. He was also a major part of the Memphis jazz and commercial music scene, performing for legends such as Bob Hope, Danny Thomas, Henry Mancini, Bob Newhart and working full-time as a staff vocalist at a broadcast music production house that made 75 percent of the English-speaking radio jingles and corporate show music in the world.

Immediately upon completing his doctorate in 1986, David was hired as a full-time faculty member of the legendary jazz program at the University of North Texas in Denton. As a jazz scholar, he taught undergraduate and graduate-level jazz history courses, directed the Jazz Repertory Lab Band, and co-taught electronic music production and The Zebras fusion ensemble with jazz education legend and fellow faculty member Dan Haerle. During his fourteen-year tenure at UNT, David also distinguished himself as a jazz scholar, publishing a textbook on American popular music, first published in 1991 and still in print, now in its third edition. He also had other refereed articles and book chapters published, including a chapter in The Cambridge History of American Music, from Cambridge (England) University Press. He presented papers at scholarly conferences hosted by The Society For American Music, The College Music Society, and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. He is an authority on the Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan arrangements for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra of the 1940s and consulted in three editions of the music and an album by the Dutch Jazz Orchestra. Some of his UNT students have gone on to international fame, including singer Norah Jones, drummer Keith Carlock (Steely Dan), trumpeter Adolfo Acosta (Tower of Power), and Michael Cogswell (curator of the Louis Armstrong Museum and Archive at Queen’s College in New York), just to name a very few.

In 2000, David was lured by the charm of the Pacific Northwest and moved to the region, accepting the position of Associate Professor and Director of Jazz Studies at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. He soon became an in-demand part of the music scene along the Interstate 5 corridor of Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia, Washington. His University Jazz Ensemble performed for the annual Christmas Jam live radio broadcast for twenty years on jazz radio station KPLU (now KNKX) and toured Scandinavia, China, Australia, Spain, and Portugal. For eighteen years, David also produced and occasionally performed on PLU’s summer professional jazz concert series Jazz Under the Stars. He has performed with local legends such as vocalists Greta Matassa and Gail Pettis, and instrumentalists such as Tracy Knoop, Jay Thomas, Bill Ramsay, Chuck Deardorf, and his “A team” trio members, bassist Clipper Anderson and drummer Mark Ivester. As a composer and arranger, David has written commissioned works that have been performed by the symphony orchestras in Memphis, Jackson (Tennessee), Midland, Dallas, and College Station (Texas), Des Moines (Iowa), wind ensembles such as The Metropolitan Winds (Dallas) and Utah State University, and jazz ensembles at the University of Cincinnati, Caleb Chapman’s Crescent City Jazz Band and Chapman/Osborn Jazz Orchestra (Salt Lake City, UT), Vaughn Wiester’s Columbus (Ohio) Jazz Orchestra, and the Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet High School jazz ensemble (Nashville).

David has adjudicated jazz festivals across the United States, including the states of Tennessee, Alabama, Texas, New Mexico, Idaho, and Washington. He also conducts jazz workshops for directors and students. He was lead instructor for the Great Basin Jazz Camp for four years, with a faculty that included Los Angeles legends Carl Saunders, Bruce Forman, and Scott Whitfield. David loves presenting fun and accessible public lectures, particularly for senior communities. In this setting, he has presented lecture/performances on topics and artists in jazz and popular music such as The Swing Era, Ladies Sing the Blues, and the music of Tin Pan Alley legends such as Harry Warren and Frank Loesser.

For a full resume, click here.