Tom Brier was born in October, 1971 in Oakdale, California, a farming community in the Great Central Valley south of Sacramento. When he was four, his parents bought an old Schubert mechanical player piano, and soon he was picking out tunes he heard on the piano rolls. Aware that their son had talent, his parents enrolled him with a local piano teacher when he was five, and in a short time he was composing and notating his own music.. He composed over two dozen rags by the age of eleven.

In 1985 he came to the attention of Larry Applegate, then the president of the Sacramento Ragtime Society. Tom was invited to play at a meeting and immediately blew everyone away with his aggressive and articulate renderings of the ragtime classics. But what amazed everyone was his depth of understanding of the early ragtime styles. His own compositions already embodied many of the subtleties of ragtime, yet were remarkably original - and all this when he was only fourteen years old. Unbelievably, he has only gotten better since then.

His mastery of the ragtime idiom has matured over a few short years. Now his signature rapid-fire left hand runs have been tempered by a new attention to the inner harmonies and voicings of ragtime. This sensitivity is seen in his own compositions which number well over 150.

He has released four CDs: Rising Star in 1994, Generic in 1997, Pianola in 2000, and Skeletons in 2003. A fifth is forthcoming.

He began appearing as a featured performer at the West Coast Ragtime Festival and other ragtime festivals right out of high school. Tom works as a programmer/analyst. When not tapping the computer keyboard at work, he's at home pounding on the piano keyboard, working up a new rag, transcribing handwritten scores or piano rolls, or busily engaged in a variety of music recording projects.