Playing music and writing music are two different things. Orlando pianist Assel Jean-Pierre Jr. has spent decades playing music, to a degree accomplished enough that he’s played at Carnegie Hall and the NFL Pro Bowl Halftime Show. Yet even in a career with more than 25 years of professional performance experience, only now is he beginning to show his full self with his own original material.
Jean-Pierre has previously released renditions of Christmas classics and kids hymns, all of which ably demonstrate his playing chops. But with his new original singles — the recent “Canonge” and the upcoming “Kinel” — he’s now at a watershed moment as an artist.
Jean-Pierre is formally trained with degrees in both classical and jazz, and that’s only the tip of his remarkably manifold background. His well of inspiration also pulls from the deep currents of his native Haiti, the broader Caribbean, gospel and contemporary. It’s a palette of extraordinary color, and now he’s finally starting to paint with all its splendor.
On debut single “Canonge,” Jean-Pierre mines inspiration from his two favorite pianists — Martinique’s Mario Canonge and the Dominican Republic’s Michel Camilo — to announce his arrival as a songwriter with pure gusto. Its roller-coaster scales pack pulse and brio, with a sensuous Caribbean fluidity that calls and commands the hips. At once technical and airy, the fleet-fingered display dazzles with its vibrance and kinesis.
“It has energy, it’s rhythmic, and it also pays homage to my Haitian roots,” says Jean-Pierre. “‘Canonge’ was my first original that I felt truly expressed the music I love to play and a reflection of me as an artist,” he says. “It truly feels like it’s me.”
On second single “Kinel” — releasing this Friday, Nov. 6 — Jean-Pierre gets especially personal. The song, which he wrote with his late uncle Kinelly Jean-Pierre but never got to record, previously existed solely as a voice memo. Now, he’s brought it to full, proper life as a beaming and balmy jazz song blowing with Afro-Cuban and Latin breezes. Like the islands it echoes, it buzzes with life yet floats without a care.
In only two originals so far, Jean-Pierre is already showcasing his staggering depth with a virtuosity that takes a rich melange of influences and serves it up as a masterful layer cake of exquisite craft and immaculate elegance. It’s music with the heart of jazz and the precision of classical technique, but a prismatic soul that is manifestly his own.
Orlando abounds in quality players of both jazz and classical. But almost none are bringing it with such form, flair and culture as Assel Jean-Pierre Jr. “Canonge” now streams everywhere and, on Nov. 6, so will “Kinel.”
This weekend, catch him live as the Assel Jean-Pierre Jr. Trio accompanied by bassist Daven-Roy Llewellyn and drummer Johnbern Thomas, with vocalist Sheimyrah Mighty. (8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 7, Blue Bamboo Center for the Arts, 460 E. New England Ave., Winter Park, bluebambooartcenter.com, $21.72-$37.25)
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This article appears in Nov. 4-10, 2026.
