The pianist Donn Trenner came up in the ranks of early bebop pianists and appears on nearly 100 jazz albums from 1950 onward. His instrumental talents include dabbling in unique keyboard instruments such as the celeste, as well as use of the cello, and he eventually became almost even better-known for his activities as a conductor and musical arranger for a variety of vocalists and television show hosts. His most famous gig along the latter lines was leading the band on the Steve Allen Show, which was the original prototype for the incredibly popular Tonight Show. In his early career, Trenner's home base of Connecticut put him within easy riffing reach of New York City and its busy jazz scene. As a combo pianist, he worked with players such as Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Oscar Pettiford, Dave Pell, Howard McGhee, Charles Mingus, and Ben Webster, some of this playing taking place after he relocated to the west coast.

His eventual finesse conducting large groups was no doubt polished while playing piano in jazz big bands led by Charlie Barnet, Tommy Dorsey, and Les Brown. The Brown band became a ticket into another type of show business entirely, one that would prove to have a much larger audience than the experimental bebop sound. Brown went to work for comedian Bob Hope, taking the talented Trenner with him and resulting in engagements as a combination music director, pianist, and arranger for Lena Horne, Nancy Wilson, Jack Jones, Dick Haymes, Ann-Margret, and the Allen television assignment. Outside of network studios, work with vocalists Wilson and Ann-Margret often led to sojourns in Las Vegas.

Donn Trenner was married during three years with singer Helen Carr, a girl five years older than him. They meet in San Francisco, in March 1945.

One of Trenner's greatest assets to performers is apparently his perfectionism; he is often willing to sacrifice great amounts of his own time to make sure a project, or more specifically, one four-bar phrase within that project, is up to snuff. As for jazz, Trenner is not one of those players who let his abilities in this genre go to flab once involved in the glitzy world of Las Vegas shows and network television. His later releases that emphasize straight-ahead jazz or jazz soloing within a song format, such as the 1996 Paul Broadnax date entitled Here's to Joe, have shown little, if any, degeneration in swing or creative ability. All in all, it could be suggested that Trenner represents an admirable blend of jazz and pop in his work that few performers are able to sustain; brief, and quite enjoyable evidence of this is his piano introduction on the original Nelson Riddle arrangement of "Route 66."

Eugene Chadbourne -All Music Guide