Lukas Gabric
Austrian tenor saxophonist, composer, and musicologist Lukas Gabric, Ph.D. (1987) is hailed by Thomas Gansch and Joel Frahm as a “master musician” with “breathtaking tenor virtuosity” and already made a mark on the international jazz scene. His performance and pedagogical activities have taken him to the USA, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Hungary, Spain, Slovenia, China, South Korea, Mongolia, Serbia, and Brazil. Throughout his formative years, Lukas Gabric was selected as a member of the European Generations Unit at the biannual Festival in Frauenfeld, Switzerland in 2012. The adjudicators included the jazz icons Louis Hayes, Peter Washington, and David Hazeltine. In 2013 he was a semifinalist in the Thelonious Monk Competition in Washington D.C. In 2014 he won the Best Soloist Award and the Audience Choice Award at the Getxo Jazz Festival in Spain and received the third prize in the finals of the North American Saxophone Alliance Competition in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. In 2016 Lukas Gabric was awarded an Herb Alpert Composer’s Award by the American Society for Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) for his composition Fire Dance. In 2018 he received the Cultural Distinction Award and Bruno Gironcoli Award from his hometown, Villach, which enabled him to produce his album Labor of Love which received positive reviews in eight countries.
In 2019 Lukas Gabric served as an adjudicator of the expert panel for the "New York International Contemporary Music Competition" at The Aaron Copland School of Music (Queens College). His playing can be heard on several albums and many other recording projects. The album Derek Bermel: Migrations (Naxos, 2019), which Lukas recorded on, was GRAMMY-nominated in the category "best new classical composition" in 2020.
Dr. Gabric received a post-graduate Artist Diploma from the Juilliard School in New York, where he was a faculty member at the preparatory division between 2014–2021 and he holds a Ph.D. in musicology from The City University of New York. He served as an adjunct lecturer at The City College of New York between 2012–2020. For his studies and artistic work, Lukas Gabric has received scholarships, stipends, prizes, and grants in the amount of approximately half a million USD. In his Ph.D. dissertation, he explored and analyzed the blues oeuvre of John Coltrane using neo-Schenkerian and Formenlehre-inspired approaches.
Lukas Gabric has also taught masterclasses and lectures at universities around the globe, published method books, musicological articles, and other educational resources. For his role as a pedagogue and mentor, he was awarded the “Extraordinary Dedication and Achievement in Teaching Distinction” by the American Protégé International Competition at Carnegie Hall in 2019 and received a “Recognition for the Contribution to the Excellence in Music Pedagogy” from the Music and Starts International Competition in 2021. In addition, he has been organizing the Carinthian International Jazz Award since 2018 (carinthiajazz.com), which has attracted competitors from 40 countries. Lukas Gabric’s latest album Double Standard (Alessa Records, 2022) entirely features original compositions. His forthcoming album Moving On will be released through Alessa Records in late 2023.