BIO

“I called the great French violinist Jean-Luc Ponty and I said ‘So, who’s the new cat? Who’s got the stuff? And he said Zach Brock.”

— Stanley Clarke, virtuoso bassist & jazz legend

“…not only is he my favorite violinist in the world but he’s also one of my favorite musicians, period.”

— Michael League, founder/bassist of Snarky Puppy

Violinist Zach Brock is a sought-after soloist, sideman, and educator, as well as a multi Grammy Award-winning member of the contemporary jazz band Snarky Puppy. Born to a musical family in Lexington, KY, Zach began studying violin at the age of four and was performing publicly by the age of six. Zach’s improvisational skills were honed in the rich Chicago jazz scene while studying classical violin at Northwestern University. He released his debut album, Zach Brock & The Coffee Achievers, in 2003. Two years and two records later he was invited to perform at Carnegie Hall by trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas. Zach joined the band of legendary bassist Stanley Clarke in 2007 and that same year he and his wife, filmmaker Erin Harper, relocated to Brooklyn. From 2010 to 2012 Zach led a chord-less trio of violin, bass and drums called The Magic Number and since 2012 he has released three albums on Criss Cross Jazz, as well as two co-led projects with renowned pianist Phil Markowitz. In 2017 Zach formed a new “chord-less” trio with Matt Ulery and Jon Deitemyer. Their collective 2019 album Wonderment garnered rave reviews and inclusion in the “Best of 2019” lists by Downbeat and Jazziz Magazines.

Zach is most widely recognized through his sixteen years of touring and recording with the genre-bending supergroup Snarky Puppy. Since his first appearance on Snarky’s 2008 on Bring Us The Bright, Zach has appeared on seven subsequent recordings including the 2017 Grammy Award-winning album Culcha Vulcha, 2019’s Immigrance, the 2021 Grammy Award-winning Live At The Royal Albert Hall, and the 2023 Grammy-award winning album Empire Central (to which he contributed his song “Honiara''). In February 2023 Zach performed with legendary guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel at the GroundUP Festival in Miami as part of Kurt’s Caipi Band. In November ‘23 GroundUP Records released Drawing Songs, the debut recording by “Brock, Lanzetti, Ogawa,” a new co-led trio with fellow Snarky Puppy members Bob Lanzetti and Keita Ogawa.

A passionate educator, Zach has coached hundreds of musicians through workshops for The 92nd Street Y and Carnegie Hall in NYC, masterclasses at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland and the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, and as a five-year “Artist In Residence” at Temple University in Philadelphia.

His eleventh solo album, the Grammy-nominated Dirty Mindz featuring Eric Harland, Mark Lettieri, Justin Stanton, and Jonathan Maron, was released in 2022 on GroundUP Records. Zach's latest collaborative album with fellow Snarky Puppy bandmates Bob Lanzetti and Keita Ogawa, Drawing Songs, was released in November 2023.