Maxim Dembow

In many ways Maxim Dembow is not your average 10 year-old. He began studying the violin at the age of three. At age four, he was jazzing up standards for fun. By the time he reached the ripe old age of five, Maxim expanded his repertoire to include the piano and began playing with the Hollywood's Farmers' Market street musicians.

Through Maxim's love for public performing, a television commercial director discovered him on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. The director offered a role to the young prodigy and Maxim found a new avenue for his music. He was soon appearing in Disney's Geppetto TV movie, playing "When You Wish Upon a Star" on his violin. In 2001, Maxim composed a two-minute piano jazz cue for the independent film, Poolhall Junkies, starring Mars Callahan, Chazz Palminteri and Christopher Walken. That same year he composed music for the film, Just for Kicks, directed by Sydney J. Bartholomew.

Audiences across America are finding out what their counterparts in such exotic marketplaces as Scandinavia, Brazil and Japan have already learned. A brash young master has arrived with the kind of instinctive genetic understanding of pop that arrives perhaps once in a decade.