Dana Landry

Contact Information

Professional/Academic Experience

Dana Landry is Director of Jazz Studies and Professor of Music at the University of Northern Colorado. Under his leadership, the UNC Jazz Studies Program has garnered over 65 DownBeat Student Music Awards. This includes nine over the last twelve years for UNC Jazz Lab Band I as Graduate College Winner, most recently in 2022. Lab I’s most recent CD release, The Romeo and Juliet Project, is a jazz suite based on Shakespeare’s most famous play. In April of 2021, the group premiered An Electronic Wonderland, a large work blending big band and electronica, featuring Ingrid Jensen, Camille Thurman, and Rachael Price.

Landry has directed all-state jazz ensembles in California, Texas, Washington, New Mexico, Kansas, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. He created curricula at UNC for undergraduate and graduate degree programs in Jazz Studies and Music Business, and designed the curriculum for a Latinx Music degree, which will begin in fall 2023. Prior to joining the faculty at UNC, he was Director of Jazz Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. 

Dana is always pursuing the next artistic challenge. He is as at home playing Bebop with a jazz quartet as he is performing Prokofiev with an orchestra, as comfortable playing duo in a small dive as he is accompanying a diva in a concert hall. He has been performing regularly with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra for the past fourteen years as part of their Classical and Pops series. In the summer of 2021, he performed Maria Schneider’s Winter Morning Walks with the great Renée Fleming at the Aspen Music Festival.

Landry has performed throughout the U.S. and in Europe, Australia, and China, and is featured on recordings released by record labels, including Summit, Origin, and Artist Alliance, several of which made it to the top of the Jazz Week U.S. Radio Airplay Chart. His first CD as a leader, Journey Home, featured virtuoso vibist Gary Burton. Landry is a member of 7 on 7, a group featuring Clay Jenkins, Paul McKee, Don Aliquo, Jim White, Steve Kovalcheck, and Erik Applegate. They plan to release their second album in 2023.