Real name: Christoph Spendel

Effective period / Period of releases: 1981 - 2001

German jazz pianist and keyboard player who is equally at home with the bebop tradition, crossover fusion and European classical music. Born on 19 July 1955 in Bytom, Poland, he is also a music journalist, and teaches jazz and pop music at the Music Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany.

Spendel became famous working with the band Jazztrack in the 1970s, and in the 1980s he was able to establish his name world wide with his own projects. He has worked with many famous musicians from the German and international jazz scene - musicians like Albert Mangelsdorff, Charlie Mariano, Wolfgang Schlüter, Randy Brecker, David Liebman, Jeremy Steig, Bill Evans and many more. For the Goethe Institute he undertook many international tours in Canada, Israel, Scandinavia and Turkey.

In the 1990s he spent a few years in New York as band member of Special EFX. As career highlights he counts performances at the Philharmony in Berlin, a TV production in Switzerland together with Lee Ritenour and Don Grusin and a piano performance for the German piano manufacturer Schimmel at the NAMM Show in Los Angeles. In 1997 he produced the composition The Three Worlds for the radio station WDR. In the same year, he was invited as solo piano artist to the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. Since 1997 he is also a member of the piano duo Jazz Meets Classic together with Ratko Delorko. He also works in a duo together with the guitar player Michael Sagmeister and leads the Christoph Spendel Electric Band.