If you want to understand Sullivan Fortner fast, watch him comp behind a singer. He doesn't just support the melody, he shadows it, argues with it, throws in a left-hand rumble from New Orleans stride piano right when you least expect it, then resolves the whole thing like nothing happened. That instinct came from growing up in New Orleans, where the line between church piano, second-line rhythm, and modern jazz harmony basically doesn't exist. He absorbed all of it before he ever left the city.

He trained formally too, at Oberlin and then Juilliard, and you can hear that discipline in how cleanly he executes ideas that would trip up a lesser player. But the technique was never the point for him. Fortner came up playing in Roy Hargrove's band, which is one of the great finishing schools in modern jazz, the place where young musicians learn that feel matters more than flash. Winning the Thelonious Monk Institute piano competition in 2015 confirmed what people in that scene already knew.

The partnership most people know him from is with Cécile McLorin Salvant. Their duo work together, especially on records like The Window (2018), is some of the most alive piano-and-voice interplay in jazz right now, closer to conversation than accompaniment. He listens so hard to her phrasing that he seems to anticipate where she's going before she gets there, and she trusts him enough to let the songs breathe and bend in real time.

As a leader, his own records show a different side, more playful and stranger. Moments Preserved (2018) and Solo Game (2020) let him roam across genres without apology, tossing in Prince covers next to standards next to his own tunes, all filtered through that New Orleans sense of rhythm. He's not trying to reinvent jazz piano. He's trying to play everything he loves at once and make it sound inevitable, which honestly might be harder.