Simon Oslender (born March 26, 1998 in Aachen) is a German Hammond organ player, keyboardist and pianist of popular music (jazz, funk, blues, gospel, pop).
Oslender grew up in a musical home: his mother is a singer in an amateur choir, his father initially gave him drum lessons, but he switched to the B3 Hammond organ at the age of five and took lessons from Stefan Michalke. In addition to his school days at the Bischöfliches Pius-Gymnasium Aachen, he has been playing in the duo Twogether (now “Oslender&Cardynaals”) with the drummer Jérôme Cardynaals since 2010 and won the Prinses Christina Concours young talent competition in Amsterdam and the Heerlen Jazz Award with him in the same year. In 2014 he was awarded the JazzRockTV 'Miles Award'. He also won the WMC Music Award in 2012 and was nominated for the Hammond Hall of Fame in 2013 and the Bremen Jazz Prize in 2014.
One of his role models is Oslender, among others, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Herbie Hancock, Larry Goldings, Joey DeFrancesco, George Duke and Frank Chastenier, who also became his teacher and mentor. Oslender performed with, among others, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Nils Landgren, Randy Brecker, Candy Dulfer and Philip Lassiter as well as with the Metropole Orkest and the WDR Big Band Cologne. In 2013 he accompanied Max Mutzke and Butterscotch and appeared at Hammond Night with Barbara Dennerlein in Ascona in 2016. In 2018, Oslender also performed with Wolfgang Haffner at Jazz Baltica, at the Jazz Festival of the Jazz Club Karlsruhe, at the Leverkusen Jazz Days, broadcast on the Rockpalast program, and played with Bill Evans in Australia. At the invitation of the Goethe-Institut, he completed a tour of Southeast Asia and also performed in Japan. He also performed at the 50th International Jazz Week Burghausen 2019.
Since mid-2018, Oslender has been a permanent member of the Wolfgang Haffner Band and Bill Evans' new line-up Bill Evans & The Spy Killers with Wolfgang Haffner and Gary Grainger on bass. He can also be heard with Haffner on his album Kind of Tango (ACT 2020).
Oslender has released two albums with Twogether so far, the 2014 album 50/50 (with Bruno Müller on guitar) and 2011 Big Brothers (LN Records). He also appears on albums by the funk band Pimpy Panda, of which he is a founding member, and by Marc Marshall (for whom he also arranged), Ryanne de Bie, Jo Didderen & l'Équipe de Rêve and Marc Huynen, among others hear. At the beginning of 2020 he released his debut album under his own name, About Time, with predominantly his own compositions and his own band on the Leopard Records label, which he presented on tour. NDR presented his second album entitled Peace of Mind (in a trio with Wolfgang Haffner and Will Lee) as “Jazz Album of the Week” in April 2022. . User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
