Tianyu Zhang is a jazz electric bass player and composer from Chengdu, China. His music blends jazz and rock with a strong emphasis on rhythmic exploration. Zhang’s research explores the intersection of jazz composition and computational musicology. His doctoral dissertation, Swing with a Smile: Humor in the Jazz Compositions of Steve Swallow, applies binary analysis to examine how humor is encoded and perceived in jazz. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Musicology and Statistics from the University of Virginia and a Master of Music in Jazz Studies from the University of Southern California. His teachers included Edwin Livingston, Bob Mintzer, Russell Ferrante, Yuxing Zheng, and Peter Spaar.

Having collaborated with renowned artists like Michel Camilo, Etienne Charles, Dafnis Prieto, Juno Su, John D’earth, Purem Jin, Greg Howard, Lauren Sevian, Carolina Cavache, and Judith Shatin, Zhang has consistently garnered praise for his skills. In 2020, he earned the Highest Distinction and the Distinguished Artist Award from the University of Virginia. In 2021, he won second place in China’s JZ Jazz Masters Competition. In 2022, Zhang was elected to the U.S. National Music Honor Society, Pi Kappa Lambda, and was offered a teaching assistantship for the Ph.D. program in Music at the University of Virginia. In 2025, he was featured in VoyageMIA and received an Outstanding Performance Award from Down Beat magazine as a member of the Frost Fusion Ensemble.

Currently pursuing a Doctorate of Musical Arts at the Frost School of Music, Zhang continues to integrate performance, theory, and technology in his work.  As an educator, he has mentored students who now tour nationally and attend top-tier music programs in the U.S.

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