ARTIST | Kris Tiner

Kris Tiner is a trumpet player, composer, and educator active on the West Coast jazz and creative music scene for over 20 years. His playing has been described as “extraordinarily inventive” in Signal to Noise Magazine, “perfectly suited to the moment” in DownBeat, and the LA Weekly states that “trumpeter Kris Tiner can turn barbed wire to beauty.” Tiner’s compositions explore connections between improvisational music traditions and systemic practices, blending jazz roots with multiple streams of contemporary music. His music has been performed on five continents, his 70+ recordings have been enthusiastically reviewed in the international jazz press, and he has been recognized with awards from ASCAP, the American Composers Forum, Chamber Music America, Montalvo Arts Center, the John F. Kennedy Center, the International Association for Jazz Education, the Kern County Music Educators’ Association, and the Levan Center for the Humanities. In addition to interdisciplinary projects involving dance, spoken word, visual art, film and animation, he has recorded music for radio, television, and motion picture scores, and his trumpet playing has been heard on MTV, NBC, PBS, and Comedy Central.

He has toured widely with the Empty Cage Quartet, whose 2008 CD Stratostrophic on Portugal’s Clean Feed record label was hailed as “one of the best things in jazz to emerge in the new millennium” by the UK magazine The Wire. He also collaborates with guitarist Mike Baggetta in the duo TIN/BAG; their CD Bridges was chosen as one of the ten best jazz recordings of 2011 in Time Out New York. Tiner performs with the Cathlene Pineda Quartet, Chris Schlarb’s Psychic Temple, Vidya Trio (with pianist Motoko Honda and saxophonist Beth Schenck), the Industrial Jazz Group, the Los Angeles Trumpet Quartet, and the Bakersfield Symphony Orchestra. He has also collaborated with Wadada Leo Smith, Vinny Golia, Kraig Grady, Tatsuya Nakatani, Nels Cline, Jeremiah Lloyd Harmon, Lukas Ligeti, Gerry Hemingway, Donald Robinson, Charles Gaines, Angelica Sanchez, Gianni Gebbia, Joe La Barbera, Jeff Kaiser, Phillip Greenlief, Nate Wooley, Lucian Ban, Todd Barton, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Ken Filiano, Taylor Ho Bynum, Lisa Mezzacappa, Sara Schoenbeck, Harris Eisenstadt, and Michael Vlatkovich. He has been featured at the FONT Festival of New Trumpet Music (New York), Aperitivo in Concerto (Milan), Clean Feed Festival (New York), Angel City Jazz Festival (Los Angeles), Is That Jazz? Festival (Seattle), Gateshead Jazz Festival (UK), In The Flow Festival (Sacramento), The Outpost Creative Soundspace Festival (Albuquerque), NMASS Festival (Austin), and the Mission Creek Arts Festival (San Francisco).

Appears on:

BIG004 | Anthony Shadduck | Quartet & Double Quartet - trumpet (Double Quartet)

BIG007 | Jeremiah Lloyd Harmon | Namesake - trumpet

BIG013 | TIN/BAG | Evening Hawks - trumpet

LIL010 | Psychic Temple | II - trumpet (6)

BIG021 | Psychic Temple | Plays Music For Airports - trumpet

BIG024 | Alex Sadnik | Flight - trumpet (Side B Quartet)

Learn more about Kris Tiner.