Kris Tiner
Kris Tiner is a trumpet artist, composer, and educator active on the West Coast jazz and creative music scene for over 25 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.” His music has been performed on five continents, and he has played on over 100 recordings that have been enthusiastically reviewed in the international jazz press. He has received awards from ASCAP, the American Composers Forum, Chamber Music America, the Kern County Music Educators Association, and the Levan Center for the Humanities. He was a Lucas Artists Fellow in composition at Montalvo Arts Center from 2012-15, where he wrote and recorded music for the solo trumpet album In the Ground and Overhead. In 2023 he was recognized as California’s jazz educator of the year by the California Music Educators Association.
Sung, his latest release on Orenda Records, is the culmination of more than 15 years of collaboration with pianist and composer Cathlene Pineda. The album features an exquisitely recorded collection of original compositions for trumpet and piano that “weave heartful melodies laced with modern subtleties” (Greg Burk, MetalJazz). The Magic Room, Tiner’s third album with master percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani, was recorded in the cavernous top floor of Bakersfield’s historic Woolworth’s building. It was featured in The Best Jazz on Bandcamp and described by Avant Music News as “deeply introspective, even in its louder moments, and simply beautiful.” In the early 2000s Tiner toured throughout the US and in Europe with the Empty Cage Quartet, hailed by NPR Music as “a thoroughly modern and multifaceted jazz ensemble that stakes out a singular voice.” Their album Stratostrophic on Portugal’s Clean Feed label was praised as “one of the best things in jazz to emerge in the new millennium” by the UK magazine The Wire.
Tiner has performed with artists from across the jazz and new music spectrum including Wadada Leo Smith, Vinny Golia, Kraig Grady, Nels Cline, Joe La Barbera, Lukas Ligeti, Charles Gaines, Mike Baggetta, Gianni Gebbia, Lisa Mezzacappa, Phillip Greenlief, Nate Wooley, Lucian Ban, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Jeff Parker, Taylor Ho Bynum, Sara Schoenbeck, Harris Eisenstadt, Jeff Coffin, Chris Schlarb’s Psychic Temple, and the Industrial Jazz Group. He is a member of the Bakersfield Jazz Orchestra and the Bakersfield Symphony Orchestra. He has been featured at the FONT Festival of New Trumpet Music (NYC), Aperitivo in Concerto (Milan), Clean Feed Festival (NYC), Angel City Jazz Festival (Los Angeles), Is That Jazz? Festival (Seattle), Gateshead Jazz Festival (UK), The Outpost Creative Soundspace Festival (Albuquerque), Le Mandala (France), NMASS Festival (Austin), In The Flow Festival (Sacramento), and the Mission Creek Arts Festival (San Francisco). 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 had new works commissioned by Hibari Ensemble (Japan), Ensemble Offspring (Australia), Microscore Project (New Zealand), Slumgum (Los Angeles), Okiro Large Ensemble, and numerous solo artists.
Tiner is a Professor of Music at Bakersfield College, where he directs the DownBeat award-winning Jazz Studies program and teaches applied trumpet. He has also taught at California Institute of the Arts, CSU Bakersfield, and Taft College. He has been a visiting lecturer and performer at Durham University, Bennington College, The Art Institute of Seattle, Northwestern University, Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, and many other institutions throughout the United States and Europe, and he has presented at conferences of the International Society for Improvised Music, California Art Education Association, Music Association of California Community Colleges, Kern County Music Educators’ Association, and CASMEC. He contributed a chapter on the history and practice of systemic music to The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Music and the Arts, an anthology of writings published by Bloomsbury Academic. He holds an MFA in African-American Improvisational Music from California Institute of the Arts, where his teachers included Wadada Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, Charlie Haden, Edward Carroll, and Morton Subotnick. Tiner is a board member of the California Alliance for Jazz, a statewide organization to promote the growth of jazz education and performance. He also serves on the board of the Bakersfield Jazz Workshop, and he has organized a successful series of concerts and multimedia performances in the emerging Downtown Arts District of Bakersfield for many years. He is the founder of Epigraph Records, an independent label dedicated to the documentation of new creative music recorded in Bakersfield.
Website: https://kristiner.com/
