At a mere 7 weeks old, twin brothers Jack & Benny Lipson were baptized in the music of the Lord—Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber—when they embarked on the second national tour of Evita, starring their mother, Valerie Perri, as the title diva. The Lipsons lived a year in fine hotels across North America, then settled in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley.

There Dad played his Beatles vinyls as Jack & Benny dried from a tandem bath, and sometimes air-conducted to Tchaikovsky recordings too. The boys listened to Mom rehearse material for her latest bookings and to Grandma tickling familiar songbook melodies at the piano. They soon started piano lessons themselves, which quickly turned into voice and musicianship training from a most inspiring teacher, Gerald White.

Middle school introduced Jack & Benny to jazz idioms and new tools: Benny taught himself bass; Jack forayed behind the drum set. At the LA County High School for the Arts, Jack read classical scores in practice rooms at lunchtime and began writing his own. Benny meanwhile played bass with the school big band and sang in their vocal jazz ensemble. Nevertheless, after their homework The Lipsons continued to jam to songs by Wings, Todd Rundgren, Yes, plus they frequented the theater with Mom and Dad.

Upon finishing high school Benny matriculated at University of Miami to study jazz voice. He engaged deeper with the American songbook and the art of arranging, often reappropriating the songs of his new heroes Harry Nillsson and Paul Simon for his jazz classes. He also found in guitar a more portable expression to share his favorite and original songs.

Jack stayed local at UCLA to hone his classical composition. He accompanied his friends singing Mozart, Verdi, Ravel, Britten, Sondheim, and everything in between. Even though he was mostly writing contemporary chamber music, Jack still cherished recording artists like Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan, and Stevie Wonder.

The couple thousand mile-distance separating Jack & Benny only drew them closer in spirit. They matched each other on the Internet Scrabble Club and upheld an exclusive two-member book club. Above all, a shared reverence for the songwriting craft magnetized the Lipsons, and affirmed Benny’s imminent return to LA.

“Bounding towards what’s next in the world of sound,” Jack & Benny Lipson shared their Los Angeles debut show in 2016 with musician-comedian Reggie Watts. At first they peddled their originals as a 4-piece prog pop-rock band at many of LA’s bar venues. But as their “sensational, clever, and astute” lyrics evolved into more nuanced millennial meditations, Jack and Benny re-outfitted their material as a piano-bass-percussion trio, and have since toured their at-once satirical and optimistic revues in theaters and cabaret rooms across the country.

Jack & Benny incubated in 10-month residency at LA’ s Lyric Hyperion Theatre, and subsequently exported their shows across the states in New York (Birdland Theater, Club Cumming), LA (Luckman Fine Arts Complex), Chicago, San Francisco, and San Diego. They presented a reading of their original “musicalette” Miranda, Please! at the 2017 Wyoming Theater Festival, and songs from Brainstorm, a 3-character revue of their material, have resounded at new musical showcases in both NY (The Duplex) and LA (Rockwell Stage).

For the LA Philharmonic, Jack & Benny co-curated and arranged-orchestrated Musik! Fantasie! Revolution!, a Weimar Germany cabaret. They co-produced holiday albums by Pia Toscano and Bethany Joy (Poets’ Road Records), as well as material for Lifetime’s Snowed Inn Christmas. The Lipsons have arranged concerts throughout California, New York, and Portland, Maine for acts including comedian Barbara Dixon, drag queen Jonnie Reinhart, and their mother.

Jack & Benny have played piano, bass, percussion, and sung in support of such luminaries as Idina Menzel, Josh Groban, Herbie Hancock, Barry Manilow and many more at iconic LA venues from The Hollywood Bowl to Disney Hall. As house band for Jonnie Reinhart’s A Queer Cabaret, they collaborated with Darren Criss, Michael Arden, Jackie Cox and others in LA (Tramp Stamp Granny’s) and NY (Club Cumming). With Ashley Joyce the Lipsons co-founded For Good: a monthly night of showtunes to save the world, which for nearly two years donated over $25k to local LA charities.