Terry Wergeland

Piano • Accordion • Trumpet

When pianist Terry Wergeland decided to increase his fluency in all 12 musical keys, he memorized Alban Berg’s first Piano Sonata—in all 12 keys. “Anyone who knows this piece will think I’m either lying or I’m nuts,” Terry says, “Or both.”

Born on the same day of the year as pianist Scott Joplin, Terry began his keyboard studies on the organ at age five when his parents bought a Wurlitzer. At 11, he added the trumpet and, when Terry hit teen-age, he began composing for piano and organ. (Also as a teen, in the Bay Area, Terry got hold of the key to his mom’s church in Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood, and he would sometimes slip in and play the organ there at one or two in the morning.)

When he graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a degree in music, Terry moved to the Seattle area, where he’s feasted on a musical buffet he created to satiate his disparate tastes, including classical,  jazz, traditional music and folk, even some rock.

Terry served for five years as organist and choir director of Woodland Park Presbyterian Church, and while there he directed a reading orchestra.

In 1992, Terry met Phil and Vivian Williams – Northwest musical icons and founders of the Folklife Festival – and began what would become a long-term friendship and music making collaboration. With Phil and Vivian, Terry recorded three albums, including Tunes from the John Neilson Music Book. These three also founded the dance trio Chassez, which became popular in the Greater Seattle region.

After Phil’s passing in 2016, Terry continued to collaborate with Vivian, and he co-produced and played on most every track of Vivian’s magnum opus, Tunes from the Aurora Violin Manuscripts.

Terry’s quest to dive ever deeper into music led him back to university where he studied math, physics, and computer science. He then created a JAVA program to calculate the number of unique 12-tone rows. Eleven years later, Terry wrote numerous JAVA programs on the subject of pitch-spaces which generated lists of interval sequences. These lists form the basis of a potential large-scale project in music theory.

Terry has performed and recorded on piano, accordion, melodeon, trumpet, cornet, and flugelhorn with many regional contra-dance bands, including Fat Chance, Keltoi, Pacific Yews, and Continental Drift, as well as in collaborations with Laurie Andres, Cathy Whitesides, and Ruthie Dornfeld. He’s also performed with swing dance bands such as The Radio Rhythm Orchestra, The S-Curves, TW Hotclub, Bar Tabac, and he maintains a longstanding jazz duo with guitarist, Phil Brooks.

Terry studies classical piano with Judith Cohen, and teaches music privately. The works of Olivier Messiaen have made a profound impression on Terry’s life.

Terry joined Joy Street in 2006.

Something Terry’s proud of: his performance of Poulenc’s 1931 Sextet, for woodwind quintet, French horn, and piano.

Something that brings Terry joy: His marriage to Kathleen Olsen in 2017, and the three parties they threw to celebrate.

Favorite dessert: Little Debbie’s Nutty Buddy. Terry says, “Sometimes I worry that people are going to discover how good they are and they’ll buy them all up.”