Shelly Berg doesn’t just play music—he inhales it, gets lost in it, bathes every organ in its emotive stream. And when he exhales it, through his fingers and entire body, listeners can’t help but be moved.

“Music is the one thing that can reach inside of everybody in the audience and cause them to feel the same thing at the same time. It changes the molecular structure of a room,” the Frost School of Music dean explained during one of his monthly “Jammin’ with the Dean” forums.

The son of a jazz trumpeter, Berg has played piano since age 3. As a teen, his Sundays culminated in jam sessions with Arnett Cobb and the legendary Texas Tenors in Houston’s jazz scene until at least 3 a.m. Berg claims those late nights never interfered with his active academic and social life. He played football and baseball in high school, devoting any remaining time to leading his Berg Blues Band.

Berg got married on his 19th birthday and at 21 became a father to the first of his three children. Always one with “boundless energy,” he performed six nights a week in nightclubs while supporting his family and studying full-time at the University of Houston. Berg, a 1988 Great American Jazz Piano Competition finalist, professes to an intimate connection with each piece he plays, often creating an impromptu narrative in his head. He remembers one night in 1993, performing with celebrated trombonist Bill Watrous at a hole-in-the-wall club in Burbank, California, where blenders and a boisterous crowd were drowning out the out-of-tune piano.

“Bill decided to play ‘A Child Is Born,’ and when it was time for my solo, I got back in touch with the day my oldest daughter was born,” Berg recalls. “I was totally immersed in this world, doing improvisation. When I looked up, the club was silent. I could feel everybody’s soul; it was like they were all giving birth with me.”

Although comfortable talking about feelings, the soft-spoken Berg admits piano is sometimes his best way to express extreme emotion—like how he felt the night before his brother died of AIDS. “I knew that was going to be his last night,” Berg says. “What do you do with that bottled-up feeling? I wrote a song that just fell out of me in the time it takes you to listen to it.”

He played “To a Fallen Friend” at his brother’s memorial, and it appears on his early album The Joy. Berg’s best-known CD, Blackbird—which reached No. 1 on JazzWeek’s U.S. jazz radio chart—includes “Julia,” written soon after Berg met the woman who would become his current wife. For his upcoming CD, Berg is working with Steve Miller, Tierney Sutton, Patti Austin, and other well-known artists with whom he shares a rich collaborative history.

As an educator, Berg implores each of his students to be “not just a replicator but a creator of music.” Whether summoning that creativity on impulse or by reaching into the story behind the notes on the page, Berg can change more than a room’s molecular structure; he can change everything his audience thought they knew and loved about music.

—Meredith Danton