Joe Deninzon

Joe Deninzon came into the world in St. Petersburg, Russia, yet spent his formative years in Cleveland, Ohio, shaping an idiosyncratic jazz-rock violin style informed by Jean-Luc Ponty, Stephane Grappelli, Jimi Hendrix, Steve Vai, and Jeff Beck. Though capable of tender, melodic expression, he shifts to a harder-edged attack on more intense selections, wielding the electric six-string violin in the manner of an electric guitar and generating the distortion and feedback familiar from hard-rock soloists. His family relocated from St. Petersburg to Cleveland when he was four, bringing along parents who both performed classical music. A violinist, his father entered the Cleveland Orchestra in 1979, while his mother worked as a pianist. Classical violin lessons were pressed upon him in childhood, yet his interests soon turned toward jazz and rock instead. He remained in Cleveland until 1997, at which point he departed for New York at age twenty-two and took up residence in Queens. His recorded output encompasses 1993’s Collage, 1998’s excellent Electric Blue, and 2002’s Adventures of Stratospheerius.