Aaron Vaurio Jackson

Aaron Vaurio Jackson is a composer from New Haven, Connecticut. Born in New Jersey, he inhabits a quirkily accessible musical mystery world that he projects like shadow puppets from the piano’s keys.

His first teacher gave him a George Winston tape as a Christmas gift. Secretly nurturing an early wish to move to Russia and receive rigorous classical piano training at a conservatory, he nevertheless fell in love with the playing of Harry Connick, Jr. and Bud Powell. And when he later discovered the music of Milton Babbitt and Cecil Taylor, his focus settled on composition.

Aaron’s early composition teachers were Anthony LaGruth and Ira Taxin. He won multiple awards as a young composer at the Juilliard School of Music’s Pre-college Division, where he studied piano with Edgar Roberts and Robert Taub. At Princeton University, he studied composition with Claudio Spies and Paul Koonce. He went on to study composition with Joseph Dubiel at Columbia University, and studied piano privately with Marilyn Nonken.

He lived from 2005 to 2010 in Boston, where he studied singing with Warren Senders, and songwriting and music production with Tim Lukas. From 2010 to 2014 he lived in Providence, where he collaborated with musicians from Community Music Works while running a concert series at the Boston Athenaeum. He moved to New Haven in 2015 to study music theory at Yale University, and decided to settle permanently in the area with his wife and two daughters.