Anton Kot

Musician and Multi-media Artist

"Drummer Kot dotted the performance with polyrhythms and a composer's wit. There was no groove domination—Kot played music, with the melody and harmony guiding his approach as much as the rhythmic qualities of a given piece. His composition Ripples was a true high point of the set" - Paul Rauch (All About Jazz)

About

Anton Kot is a New York City-born multi-instrumentalist and composer working across drums, piano, and composition. Recognized by BMI as a 2025 Future Jazz Master, he has performed at some of the world's most celebrated stages and festivals, led ensembles featuring saxophonists Don Braden and Albert Rivera, bassist Avery Sharpe, trumpeter Jean Caze, and pianists Caili O'Doherty and Manuel Valera, and earned a reputation as a singular voice in contemporary jazz. "One audience member called Anton 'a highlight in the [Litchfield] Festival's history.' Praise well deserved." — Vita Muir, Founder, Litchfield Jazz Festival, A Triumph at 27!, August 9, 2022.In 2022, Anton premiered his commissioned twenty-five-minute piano concerto, Let's Try This, on the main stage of the New Haven International Festival of Arts and Ideas with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, directed by Alasdair Neale. Commissioned before the pandemic, the piece evolved into a sonic reflection on the varying phases of the COVID outbreak as it entered social awareness in 2020. Let's Try This is a self-reflection where a pianist rediscovers their instrument under the stress of induced isolation, designed to be performed differently each time as a nod to the insistent volatility of COVID's effect on daily life...

Lessons

Whether you're just starting out or looking to deepen your skills, my lessons are designed to help you discover and develop your own musical voice. We begin with essential drumming fundamentals—posture, rudiments, reading, groove vocabulary, and developing active listening skills—to build a solid technical foundation and confidence. As we progress, we also explore composition and arranging, with opportunities to engage in jazz and orchestral orchestration.Lessons are tailored to each student's interests and goals, whether that's personal enrichment, performance, or preparation for collegiate-level music study. I prioritize nurturing student’s musical instincts by helping them recognize and refine their natural musical responses, creating a flexible, encouraging environment where creativity and musical growth can thrive.

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Music

Haven’t Heard Back by Anton Kot (Feat. Jack Towse)

My Eyes Touched the Ceiling by Anton Kot (Feat. Summer Carmargo)

Going but Not Moving (Ari Hoenig, Cole Palensky, Warren Louie, Anton Kot)

Ripples by Anton Kot (Feat. Tyler Bullock II and Warren Louie)

Playing in a Corner by Anton Kot (Feat. Alan Broadbent)

My Favorite Things (Feat. Manuel Valera)

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (Feat. Esteban Castro)

Tell Me Why by Anton Kot (Live at the Litchfield Jazz Festival)

I Thought I Should Know by Anton Kot (Feat. Tyler Bullock II)

Tone Poem by Manuel Valera

Going but Not Moving by Anton Kot (Feat. Brad Shepik)

Ripples by Anton Kot, Live at the Detroit Jazz Festival (Feat. L Stop)

Let's Try This by Anton Kot, Live at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, Commissioned and Performed with the New Haven Symphony

Clean Jawn by Tiger Diep (Feat. L Stop)

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About Anton Kot

Anton Kot is a New York City-born multi-instrumentalist and composer recognized by Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) as a 2025 Future Jazz Master. Raised by visual artist parents in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and along the Connecticut coast, he received his first drum set at age three and began piano lessons at four. After attending a Philip Glass performance at the nearby venue Roulette, he composed his first piece, Snowstorm — an early sign of the restless creative curiosity that has defined his career. An alumnus of New York University and a current graduate student at The Juilliard School, Kot is a recipient of the Juilliard Tito Puente Scholarship Award and a member of the Gluck Community Service Fellowship.2025 — PresentIn March 2026, Kot presented his senior recital at Morse Hall, The Juilliard School, featuring original compositions alongside new arrangements of works by Lenny White, Cedar Walton, and Kenny Wheeler. That same month, his composition All Hands, One Kit — mixed in Juilliard's Visual Media Scoring Studio and performed with a state-of-the-art immersive audio system — premiered at the Future Stages Festival as part of the Auras and Emanations new music series. In the spring of 2026, he is scheduled to perform at Dizzy's Club, Jazz at Lincoln Center, with the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra, and at the Blue Note Jazz Club as part of the Mary Lou Williams Ensemble, coached by Bruce Williams.
The 2025–2026 period has brought a range of recording work across diverse projects. Kot contributed drums to the score for Spanish guitarist Niño Josele's film Bajani (Womack Studios, 2026 release), appears on flutist and saxophonist Erica von Kleist's PICC POCKET (releasing April 2026), and performs on guitarist Owen Chen's The Ghibli Collection — a Studio Ghibli jazz album on OA2 Records — for which he has also been a frequent live performer with Chen's Eternal Wind Quintet at The Red Pavilion in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He also appeared as a drummer on the Springfield Jazz Orchestra's performance Jazz Royalty: Ellington and Basie Reign, led by Todd Stoll, and performed with trombonist Calvin Sexton's Winds of Change, celebrating the music of Jothan Callins, at the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in February 2026.
Among the most distinctive engagements of this period, Kot was invited to perform a solo piano set at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 2025, animating artist Rashid Johnson's site-specific installation A Poem for Deep Thinkers — an immersive work filling the museum's iconic rotunda with video projections, sculpture, and ceramics. He also performed as bandleader with Anton Kot: Volume at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola, Jazz at Lincoln Center, over three nights in June 2025, featuring Austin Ford on trumpet and flugelhorn, John Ellis on tenor saxophone, and Manuel Valera on piano. That summer brought appearances with Helen Sung's Big Band and Beyond at the Chicken Bone Beach Jazz Series in Atlantic City and with the Grammy Award-winning Zaccai Curtis Trio at a Litchfield Jazz and Milton Music presentation in Litchfield, Connecticut. He also performed at the YoungArts New York Gala at the Temple of Dendur, Metropolitan Museum of Art — one of several annual appearances celebrating his 2019, 2020, and 2021 National YoungArts Foundation Jazz Awards.
Since 2023, Kot has served with Carnegie Hall NYO Jazz in a touring leadership capacity and On-call Program Photographer, accompanying tours to Asia, Europe and the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Central and South America. He has also remained on faculty at the Litchfield Jazz Camp as a percussion instructor, teaching combo and private lessons.2022 — 2024In June 2024, Kot was a fellow at the Ravinia Steans Music Institute Jazz Program in Highland Park, Illinois, premiering a new composition, Voiceless Memories, at the Ravinia Music Festival under the direction of jazz artistic directors Billy Childs, Steve Wilson, and Rufus Reid. That same month, he attended the Kennedy Center's prestigious Betty Carter Jazz Ahead residency in Washington, D.C., led by artistic director Jason Moran alongside Benny Green, Jimmy Greene, Carmen Lundy, Ingrid Jensen, and Linda May Han Oh.
As a recording artist, Kot performed on bassist Avery Sharpe's double quartet album, I Am My Mother's Keeper (2024). He also recorded and toured with Lang Xie as part of an album release titled Marin Affairs Department — including performances at JZ Club Shanghai, JZ Club Hangzhou, and Chengdu City Concert Hall in summer 2024. He performed in a private concert series in Abu Dhabi in December 2024.
As a bandleader, Kot headlined the 2023 Pittsfield City Jazz Festival, the Washington Heights Jazz Festival, and led his quartet and trio at notable New York City venues, including The Django. He was the inaugural winner of the National YoungArts X Anthropologie Leading with Creativity Award (2023), commissioned to compose and record music for Anthropologie's national holiday campaign, and performed at the YoungArts New York Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023 and 2024. The Honeywell Arts Academy honored him as a Resonance Fellow in 2023 and as the inaugural year-long Honeywell Fellow in 2024, with a celebratory performance at the Eagles Theatre in Wabash, Indiana.
In 2022, Kot premiered his commissioned twenty-five-minute piano concerto, Let's Try This, on the main stage of the New Haven International Festival of Arts and Ideas with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, directed by Alasdair Neale. The piece is a self-reflection where a pianist rediscovers their instrument under the stress of induced isolation, designed to be performed differently each time as a nod to the insistent volatility of COVID's effect on daily life. The Berkshire Jazz Festival commissioned Kot that same year for a new work for its 10x10 Upstreet Arts Jazz Composers Showcase. The resulting quartet piece, Haven't Heard Back — which later appeared in his 2026 Juilliard recital program — explores nostalgia and the influence of social connection on individual identity.
The summer of 2022 saw a particularly active stretch of performances: Anton performed with the Makanda Project featuring renowned saxophonist Chico Freeman in Boston, appeared as a drummer at Chelsea Table + Stage in New York City with vocalist Crystal Lewis, and returned to Jazz at Lincoln Center with trumpeter Tatum Greenblatt, opening for Wynton Marsalis. Earlier that spring, during a semester at NYU-Paris, he performed at the famed Le Duc des Lombards and Sunset/Sunside jazz clubs alongside pianist Laurent Coq and saxophonist David Prez, and collaborated with musicians at the Royal School of Music and Paris Conservatory. He also headlined the 2022 Litchfield Jazz Festival, featuring saxophonist Don Braden, Albert Rivera, bassist Avery Sharpe, trumpeter Jean Caze, and pianist Caili O'Doherty. Litchfield Jazz Festival founder Vita Muir wrote in A Triumph at 27!: "One audience member called Anton 'a highlight in the Festival's history.' Praise well deserved."Before 2022Anton Kot and Friends shared his original compositions as a headliner at the Bronx River Art Center Annual Sounds Performing Arts Festival Streams of Black Music in 2021, and he served as drummer for the NYU Steinhardt Vocal Performance Village Voices directed by Janis Siegel. During the pandemic, he co-founded the group L Stop with fellow NYU musicians; the group was selected as the collegiate-level winner of the Detroit Jazz Festival Collegiate Combo Competition at the Dirty Dog Café and went on to perform at the Detroit Jazz Festival. He was also selected to participate in Jazz Aspen Snowmass in 2021, having previously performed with the Snowmass Orchestra under Chuck Bergeron, Shelly Berg, and Christian McBride in 2020.
In 2019, Anton toured Asia with Carnegie Hall's NYO Jazz, acclaimed trumpeter Sean Jones, and Grammy Award-winning vocalist Kurt Elling, performing in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong — including the National Taichung Theater, the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, Jazz at Lincoln Center Shanghai, the Shanghai Oriental Art Center, the Zhuhai Huafa and CPAA Grand Theater, and the Asia Society Hong Kong Center. Wycliffe Gordon and Jon Faddis joined the group on the Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage at Carnegie Hall in New York. As a member of the Jazz at the Lincoln Center Youth Orchestra, led by Ted Nash and Tatum Greenblatt, Anton performed at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola and the Appel Room with special guests Camille Thurman, Sherman Irby, Marshall Gilkes, and Marcus Printup, and served as drummer in the Public Shakespeare Theater's Off-Broadway production Such Sweet Thunder at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in 2018.
In 2017, Anton shared the stage with Majid Khaliq and Eric Brown at the Harlem School of the Arts Fall Benefit Gala — honoring alumni Ray Chew, Mary J. Blige, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Deborah L. Lee — hosted by Sunny Hoston at The Plaza on 5th Avenue, New York City.Award-Winning Ensembles and OrchestraAnton's ensemble and orchestral history includes nationally recognized honors. The Jazz at the Lincoln Center Youth Orchestra received the Outstanding Specialized Big Band Award at the 2020 Charles Mingus National Festival — where Anton performed as a pianist — and the 2019 DownBeat Honors Ensemble Award, when he was a drummer. His Manhattan School of Music Precollege Ensemble, led by Jeremy Manasia, was recognized with a DownBeat Student Music Award for Superior Honors Ensemble. Anton performed for four years in Jeff Fuller's Neighborhood Music School Premier Scholar Jazz Ensemble, which opened for the Brubeck Brothers in New Haven. Through the Educational Center for the Arts, he performed at the Berklee College of Music High School Jazz Festivals, earning Outstanding Musicianship, Judge's Choice, and Outstanding Soloist awards across multiple years in Drums, Piano, and Vibraphone, alongside ensemble recognition for both large jazz and vocal ensembles. The group L Stop was selected as a collegiate-level finalist at the Detroit Jazz Festival in 2021.Recognition and AwardsAnton has received the 2025 BMI Future Jazz Master Award and was nominated for the 2023 American Pianists Award. He is a three-time National YoungArts Foundation Award winner in Jazz and has performed at YoungArts Galas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art each year from 2023 to 2025. He received the Billy Strayhorn Award for Upcoming Young Musicians, presented by Vita Muir and Don Braden at the Litchfield Jazz Festival in 2017, and was an invited NAfME All-National Honors All Star in Jazz Drums, led by Todd Stoll with special guest Pharez Whitted. He served as drummer for the Jazz Band of America under Dr. Ron McCurdy, and earned multiple Berklee College of Music High School Jazz Festival awards in Drums, Piano, and Vibraphone. He was selected as a 2019 Vail Jazz All Star Drummer and performed at the 2018 Newport Jazz Festival with the Berklee Global Jazz Institute.
Anton was invited to study in the New Haven Symphony Orchestra Young Composers Program under renowned pianist and composer Michael Brown, and subsequently studied privately with NHSO Director and Principal Conductor Alasdair Neale. Neale later commissioned him for a full orchestra piece after hearing his composition Rise at the NHSO Rise Gala; the resulting work, Let’s Try This, premiered at the Arts Festival. Additional honors include the Manhattan School of Music Precollege Nana's Way Scholarship for Outstanding Talent and Academic Achievement, and from the Neighborhood Music School, the Executive Director's Choice Award for Excellence in Performance and the Danko/Todd Award for Excellence in Jazz Studies and Performance.StudiesAnton is currently pursuing his Master of Music in Jazz Studies (Drums) at The Juilliard School, studying privately with Kenny Washington, Paul Wells, and Donald Vega. He holds a Bachelor of Music in Performing Arts and Jazz Studies (Drums) from New York University Steinhardt, where he received the Music and Performing Arts Professions Outstanding Achievement Jazz Studies Graduation Award. His NYU ensembles were led by Chris Potter, Bobby Sanabria, Dezron Douglas, Lenny White, Marcus Miller, and Brad Shepik, and he studied privately with Lenny White, Billy Drummond, Ari Hoenig, and Antoine Banville on drums, and Alan Broadbent and Manuel Valera on piano — Banville during his NYU-Paris semester, where he also studied with Laurent Coq.
Beginning in seventh grade and continuing through high school, Anton was a member of the Wesleyan University Advanced Gamelan Ensemble — historically among Wesleyan's youngest students invited to participate. He completed eight full semesters alongside graduate, doctoral, and undergraduate students under Master Composers Pak Sumarsam and I.M. Harjito, and performed at the International Gamelan Festival in Solo, Indonesia, with the Advanced Gamelan Ensemble and members of the Sultan Family at the Kraton Sultan Resort in Yogyakarta, and for Music and Dance of Yogyakarta, co-presented with Yale University and the Asia Society in conjunction with Sri Sultan Hamengkubuwono X and the Royal Yogyakarta Court Residency.