The Complete Musician Still Exists

What does a truly complete musician look like today?

In my recent conversation with Ronn Yedidia, I was reminded that such a figure still exists — and that he puts most of us to shame.

Yedidia is one of those rare artists who refuses to live inside a category. A child prodigy born in Tel Aviv, he began on the accordion at six, performing serious repertoire almost immediately. By seven, he had moved to the piano. By eight, he had won a national competition. His path eventually led him to Juilliard School, where he studied with Milton Babbitt and David Diamond.

Ronn moves effortlessly between worlds that are usually kept far apart. His catalog includes large-scale piano sonatas of formidable ambition, a set of 24 Preludes that engage deeply with the tradition of Frédéric Chopin, Alexander Scriabin, and Sergei Rachmaninoff — while remaining unmistakably his own — alongside orchestral works, chamber music, and, almost disorientingly, over 200 pop songs. Beyond composing and performing, he runs the New York Piano Academy and continues to perform on accordion with his folk/world ensemble DanzaNova.

At the same time, he leads a jazz ensemble whose album Prophets spans nearly forty years of composition. The opening track, Landscapes (1981), is relentless, virtuosic, propulsive, and alive. It demands stamina and precision, but never loses its sense of joy. It brought a smile to my face when I first heard it. Ronn told me it was inspired by a journey he undertook to the southern tip of the Sinai desert, by the Red Sea, just before the territory was returned to Egypt. The project has a long history: its first iteration was produced by Thomas Frost — the legendary producer behind Vladimir Horowitz — and featured an earlier ensemble that included bassist Darryl Jones of The Rolling Stones.

We live in a hyper-specialized culture where musicians are expected to stay in their lane. Classical composers in one box. Jazz musicians in another. Crossing those lines is often treated as dilution, or lack of seriousness. Yedidia rejects that entirely.

“I just love every good sound that strikes me,” he told me.

It’s one thing to admire many styles, it’s another to write convincingly in them, and to perform at a high level across all of them.

Listening to his 24 Preludes of Dusk and Dawn, what stands out is not just craft, but beauty. They are tonal, lyrical, sometimes playful, sometimes introspective — unapologetically expressive and beautiful in a way that modern music has often been reluctant to be. And yet they are far from simple. Harmonically, they move unpredictably. Structurally, they follow their own internal logic. At one point, Ronn told me that Prelude No. 4 begins in B-flat and ends in C major — and that it used to bother him. Until he realized something essential: You don’t control the music. You follow it.

I found especially interesting hearing the unexpected sources of inspiration behind the Preludes — everything from Domenico Scarlatti to Chick Corea, even fútbol legend Diego Armando Maradona. Ronn is fortunate to have Gila Goldstein as a champion. Her recording of the Preludes for Albany Records (now PARMA Recordings) brings out the virtuosity, the beauty, and the unapologetically expressive side of the music.

His piano sonatas reveal another side entirely — dense, virtuosic, pushing the limits of the instrument. Pianists like Marc-André Hamelin have taken them on, which tells you everything you need to know about their difficulty and substance. Take a look at his recording of the Sonata No. 3 “Outcries” on YouTube.

And then there’s Prophets, which opens yet another door. The level of ensemble playing is staggering — tight unisons at extreme tempos, intricate rhythmic interplay — but what makes it compelling is not the difficulty. It’s the sense of discovery. Like André Previn or Friedrich Gulda, Yedidia feels completely at home in multiple musical languages. Taken together, his work points to something we may have forgotten: musical identity does not have to be singular. It can be plural. It can absorb, transform, and reimagine. Its value lies in how it speaks and not in the category it occupies.

That perspective becomes even more relevant when the conversation turns to the state of music today. Yedidia doesn’t deny the presence of talent — far from it. But he questions whether the language itself is truly evolving.

“They call it modern music,” he said, “but it isn’t modern. We’ve been chewing the same thing for decades.”

Not that we should abandon the past, or that we should reject the present. But that we should refuse the false choice between them. Yedidia’s work suggests another path: a music that is open, rooted in tradition and yet exploratory.

Or, as he put it:

“Let music unite us rather than separate us.”

If nothing else, this conversation is a reminder that musicians like this still exist, and that the future of music may depend less on inventing something entirely new, and more on rediscovering how much is already possible. I don’t remember who said that we should should walk through life backwards into the future with our eyes fixed on the past. Or something like that…

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Listen to 24 Preludes of Dusk and Dawn here on YouTube:

And Prophets here on Spotify: