Composer/Performer/Educator Paul Scherer is a native of Wilmington, Delaware and has lived in Chicago for the past 21 years. He is a composer, jazz pianist, arranger and producer who has composed and produced albums under his own name and with Agnieszka Iwanska, a Polish-born jazz chanteuse.

While performing in jazz ensembles in and around Chicago, Paul also makes time for some serious compositions, including his most recent settings of Hebrew text for chorus and orchestra.

Paul recently completed the score for a full-scale chamber opera entitled “In Venice", in collaboration with librettist Germaine Shames.

Paul has had a lifelong passion to compose and arrange music that has meaning, is melodically and harmonically rich, yet is never out of reach of the listener or performer. After completing his bachelors and masters degrees at the University of Delaware and Indiana University, Paul composed dozens of jazz tunes, many for local vocalists.

In 2016, his large-scale symphonic work, Kaddish for chorus and orchestra, had its premiere in Chicago.  Following the success of Kaddish, Paul completed three additional large scale works for chorus and orchestra: Femme Noir, A Woman of Valor and Mother Nature. These works had their premieres in April 2018

In 2018, he and Germaine Shames completed the songs for a new musical, Capri.  

In 2019, Paul completed a film score to accompany a film from the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive which chroincles the lives of ordinary European Jewish citizens just before WWII. The work has been entered into the US Holocaust Memorial Museum library in Washington, DC.

Paul holds bachelors and masters degrees in music theory and music technology.   

He serves on the board of the Chicago Center for Music Education, where he is board president, and the BoHo Theater.