Born and raised in Washington, D.C., John Royen was hooked by jazz at 14 when his father's big-band LP set landed the needle on Fats Waller. He started trying to play ragtime at 18, working through 'Maple Leaf Rag' measure by measure against a recording and the sheet music, and never looked back.
Royen met stride legend Don Ewell in D.C. around 1974 and studied with him until Ewell's death in 1983 — Ewell even willed Royen his 1943 Baldwin baby grand. He moved to New Orleans in 1976 to attend Loyola University, drawn as much by the city's music as its classrooms. Early solo gigs at the Gazebo grew into the piano chair of the just-forming Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble, then a sub spot at Preservation Hall; after Sweet Emma Barrett and Dave Williams died, Alan Jaffe handed him the regular chair alongside Kid Thomas Valentine. He stayed with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band for 25 years, playing the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian, and three tours of the former Soviet Union with the LRJE.
OffBeat calls him 'the man who brought East-Coast style stride piano jazz to Preservation Hall in the early 1980s.' His 2001 debut Solo Tradition documents sixteen stride classics unaccompanied, and Green Swamp (c. 2021) pairs him with clarinetist Kim Cusack as John Royen's New Orleans Rhythm. He has recorded and performed extensively with Tim Laughlin, Pete Fountain, the Dukes of Dixieland, and the reorganized Original Dixieland Jazz Band. By day he works as a docent for Pearl River Eco Tours — 'alligators during the day and lounge lizards at night.'
