Known as the connoisseur's jazz artist, pianist Ellis Larkins was born on May 15, 1923 and began his early musical training at home in Baltimore. In 1934 the ten-year-old prodigy made his debut as a pianist with the City Colored Orchestra and, a year later, performed for Eleanor Roosevelt at Douglass High School. He studied on full scholarship at the Peabody Conservatory of Music and later graduated from the Juilliard School in New York. For his senior recital at Juilliard, Larkins gave a stunning impromptu demonstration on the similarities between the melodic lines of Bach and "boogie-woogie."

Larkins developed his own elegant and sophisticated style when he began playing jazz in the clubs in New York to support himself during his student days. "I deviated to jazz and never deviated back," he explained to Alec Wilder, author of the definitive American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950. Writing for Down Beat magazine, Wilder described Larkins' style: "Technically he is a marvel, accomplishing his infinitely fine musical embroidery by means of wholly relaxed fingers, a musical mind and a loving heart."

In 1942, at the age of nineteen, he made his debut at New York's Café Society Uptown in a trio led by guitarist Billy Moore. For the next decade he led his own trio, playing at the Blue Angel and the Village Vanguard. The New Yorker magazine lauded his "diaphanous, elusive, feather-touch style. A Newsweek article on Larkins' appearance at Gregory's started a rush on the Upper East Side jazz venue. Between 1951 and 1959 Ellis Larkins made a remarkable series of recordings Decca that now are collectors' items.

By the early 1970s Larkins had made his Town Hall debut, played Carnegie Hall with Leonard Bernstein and Ella Fitzgerald, and was starring in jazz festivals all over the world. Voted Best Jazz Pianist and in demand from San Francisco to Paris, Larkins still took time to do benefit performances for CORE, the Urban League and for schools and colleges back in Baltimore. For more than seven years Larkins took up residence in New York's famed Carnegie Tavern where people flocked to hear him perform.

Larkins, a masterly accompanist, played with some of the greatest legends of our time, including Billie Holliday, Coleman Hawkins, Sarah Vaughn, Mildred Bailey, Anita Ellis, Ertha Kitt and Maxine Sullivan. He teamed up with Ella Fitzgerald for eight incredible recordings, including Ella Sings Gershwin (Decca 8378). Larkins' incredible performance with Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young was captured on Classic Tenors (Flying Dutchman FD 10146). Recordings by Ellis Larkins are distributed throughout all of Europe, the former Soviet Union, South America, Scandinavia, Japan and the Far East.

Larkins died on September 30, 2002.