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Joe Alterman is available for concerts, jazz club appearances, festivals, performing arts series, and private events, appearing solo or with his trio. Drawing from the Great American Songbook, jazz standards, blues, and his own music, each performance is shaped for the room and the occasion.

Joe also offers specially curated programs combining live music, storytelling, history, and conversation, exploring the people, songs, and stories that shaped American music.

Ahmad Jamal, Les McCann, Ramsey Lewis, and a Musical Life Shaped by Mentorship

Guided by Giants is a deeply personal journey through modern jazz piano, centered on three of the music’s most distinctive and influential voices: Ahmad Jamal, Les McCann, and Ramsey Lewis. Each began as a musical hero to pianist Joe Alterman and, over time, became a mentor and close friend.

Through live performance, historical context, and stories drawn from those friendships, Alterman illuminates what made each artist unmistakable: Jamal’s mastery of space and musical architecture, McCann’s soul, spontaneity, and infectious spirit, and Lewis’s elegance, groove, and joy. He also explores the lessons they offered about finding one’s own voice, connecting with an audience, and making music that is sophisticated without sacrificing warmth or pleasure.

Performing with his trio, Alterman brings those lessons to life through hard-swinging standards, soulful ballads, blues, funk, original compositions, and familiar songs transformed through the language of jazz—the kind of music Ramsey Lewis memorably described as “happy music with tasty meat on the bones.”

Part concert, part jazz history, and part personal remembrance, Guided by Giants celebrates three singular artists and the friendships that helped shape Alterman’s life and music. It is ultimately a story about mentorship, individuality, generosity, and the human connection at the heart of jazz.

Marked by warmth, groove, humor, and a direct connection with audiences, the program reveals how three great mentors helped Alterman discover his own voice. DownBeat has praised his playing as “hard-swinging,” and his live trio album Sincerely, was recorded at New York’s legendary Birdland.

Praise from the Giants

“Having known Joe Alterman on a personal level, I can attest to the fact that he is a very special artist.”
—Ahmad Jamal

“Joe is tiny, but only in stature. As a man and a musician, he is already a giant. He’s on a ‘blow your mind’ level.”
—Les McCann

“Joe Alterman is a breath of fresh air on the music scene. I love hearing him play! It’s happy music with tasty meat on the bones! Although much younger than I, he is an inspiration to me! His piano playing, his will to explore, and his ability to swing are a joy to behold.”
—Ramsey Lewis

Music, Freedom, and Defiance

Jazz has always carried ideas that authoritarian governments fear: individuality, improvisation, cultural exchange, and freedom. In Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and other repressive societies, the music was censored, denounced, restricted, and sometimes forbidden. Yet musicians and listeners continued to play it, circulate it, and cherish it—often at extraordinary personal risk.

In Jazz Behind the Curtain, pianist and storyteller Joe Alterman and his trio bring these remarkable histories to life through performance and narration. Drawing on Alterman’s extensive research and writing, the program explores jazz not simply as entertainment, but as an expression of freedom and an act of defiance. It reveals what the music has meant to people who were told they could not hear or play it—and why its message remains so powerful today.

How Jewish Artists & Entrepreneurs Helped Shape the American Sound

The Sounds of Jewish America explores the extraordinary role Jewish artists, songwriters, publishers, and entrepreneurs played in shaping American music. From Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Harold Arlen through jazz, Broadway, the birth of the modern music industry, rock and roll, the Brill Building, Bob Dylan, and beyond, the program reveals how Jewish creativity became woven into the soundtrack of American life.

Through live music, storytelling, and historical context, pianist and storyteller Joe Alterman brings to life the people, partnerships, and songs behind this remarkable history. The program explores the creative exchange between Jewish songwriters and African American performers, the entrepreneurs who built the institutions through which American music reached the world, and the ways music offered identity, connection, and even resistance during some of history’s darkest moments.

At once entertaining and deeply meaningful, The Sounds of Jewish America tells a larger story about immigration, ambition, assimilation, identity, and belonging—and about how generations of Jewish artists found their place in America while helping America discover its voice.

The program may be presented as a single concert or expanded into a four-part series:

1) From Irving Berlin to Louis Armstrong
Jewish Songwriters, Black Performers, and the Creation of an American Sound

Discover the connections among Irving Berlin, Louis Armstrong, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, and many others whose collaborations and creative exchanges helped define American music. Through songs and stories, the program explores how Jewish songwriters and African American performers transformed one another’s work—and, in the process, helped create a sound the world came to recognize as uniquely American.

2) The Birth of the Music Industry
The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Helped Build the Business of American Music [The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Helped Build the American Music Industry]

An expansive look at the publishers, record-label founders, producers, managers, promoters, and other entrepreneurs who helped lay the foundation of the modern music business. The program explores how immigrants and their children built new institutions around sheet music, recordings, radio, film, and live performance—and how their ambitions changed not only the business of music, but the music itself.

3) Jazz and Popular Music in Germany During the Holocaust
Music, Identity, and Resistance in the Darkest of Times

In Nazi Germany, jazz and other forms of popular music were censored, condemned, and sometimes forbidden. Yet musicians and listeners continued to play, circulate, and cherish the music, often at extraordinary personal risk. Through performance and storytelling, this program explores the resilience of artists who made music under persecution and the enduring human need for freedom, individuality, and creative expression.

4) The Brill Building Era and Beyond
From the Golden Age of Pop to Bob Dylan

Explore the Jewish songwriters, lyricists, producers, and publishers who shaped the sound of postwar popular music. From the songwriting teams associated with the Brill Building to the emergence of Bob Dylan—who might be called the “Lenny Bruce of music”—the program traces a transformation from polished pop craftsmanship to a more personal, provocative, and distinctly modern form of songwriting.