“You’ve got a great player here.” Ray Brown Eric Pan builds multi-sensory playgrounds around music. Mixing piano, photography, art installation, and immersive storytelling, Eric invites audiences to engage with songs and improvisation through physical exploration. ❧ Imagine going on a walk in the park. In the middle of a grassy field, you discover a colorful phone booth covered in fuzzy balls, built from century-old windows, one skylight propped open. As though you were visiting a gallery, the booth welcomes you to step inside, then listen to music + found-sounds: this is teleportation, or as close to it as anything that exists today. That’s one way into Travel Poems, Eric’s solo recording artist debut. The music originated in the rainforests of Costa Rica, a collection of song-postcards composed from stories of people and places. This blossomed a recording tour on pianos across four continents, yielding a 30-track sonic kaleidoscope: solo, duo, and trio performances threaded through found-sound stories also curated from around the world. Why score music with soundscapes? For the same reason that the phone booth is both transporter & time machine — and why live shows of Travel Poems feature spoken stories woven into concerts. Collaborative improvisation, among virtuoso soloists, and in response to immersive storytelling, allows both listeners and performers to create sound-imagination spaces together. Eric’s newest project is Lullabies of the Pleiades — six concise solo piano pieces transcribed from indigenous Pleiadian songs, each as sung to a young loved one, local to the far constellation. This exoplanetary musicology project aims to amplify previously undocumented music and its connected folklore, with more research findings to come. ❧ Born in Taiwan and reared on-the-go between Taipei, Boulder, and the American Southwest, Eric Pan found his musical footing with the discovery of jazz at the University of California, Santa Cruz. These studies propelled him onto stages with Jeff Hamilton and Roy Hargrove, plus over a decade’s tenure as New York City jazz pianist and composer. Pan’s compositions and improvisations reveal a relentless pursuit of simplicity, craft, and universality. Hear him interviewed on-air next to Orson Welles on national radio with PRI’s “The World”, and read his premiere interview in JAZZIZ Magazine.