Biography
KRIS TINER (b. 1977) is a California-based trumpet player, composer, and improviser. Featured on NPR Music as one of five new trumpet voices impacting modern music, Tiner has been described as “extraordinarily inventive” (–Signal to Noise), and LA Weekly jazz critic Greg Burk claims, “Trumpeter Kris Tiner can turn barbed wire to beauty.” Incorporating ideas from various fields of psychological and transpersonal inquiry, Tiner’s compositions explore connections between improvisational world music traditions and systemic compositional practices, blending deep jazz roots with references to many diverse streams of contemporary and experimental music. Tiner’s music has been performed on five continents, his 40+ 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, the International Association for Jazz Education, and the John F. Kennedy Center. In 2012 he was awarded a Composers Fellowship at the Lucas Artists Residency Program at Montalvo Arts Center. In addition to interdisciplinary collaborations 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, and Comedy Central.
He is a member of 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 New York guitarist Mike Baggetta in the duo Tin/Bag, exploring “abstract yet jazz-derived realms of expansive lyricism and liquid melody” (–Time Out New York). Kris is a regular member of the Industrial Jazz Group and a founding member of the Los Angeles Trumpet Quartet. Among the many notable musicians he has performed and/or recorded with are Vinny Golia, Wadada Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, Donald Robinson, Gerry Hemingway, Nels Cline, Mary Oliver, Ken Filiano, Kraig Grady, Tatsuya Nakatani, Taylor Ho Bynum, Jeff Kaiser, Anne LeBaron, G.E. Stinson, Steuart Liebig, Alicia Mangan, Chris Schlarb, Hans W. Koch, Pete Christlieb, Han-earl Park, Motoko Honda, Michael Vlatkovich, Joe LaBarbera, Harris Eisenstadt, Lukas Ligeti, Aurelien Besnard, Sara Schoenbeck, Phillip Greenlief and Brad Dutz.
A California native, Kris holds an MFA in African-American Improvisational Music from California Institute of the Arts and a BA in Music from California State University, Bakersfield. He has studied composition with Wadada Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, Doug Davis and Morton Subotnick, and trumpet with Edward Carroll and Charles Brady. He has lectured on both music and visual art, and currently directs the jazz program and teaches courses in jazz and American popular music at Bakersfield College. He is also an adjunct faculty member in the Music Department at California State University, Bakersfield, and has taught at Taft College, Wasco High School, and the Academy of Creative Education in Los Angeles. He has been a visiting lecturer/performer at CalArts, Bennington College, The Art Institute of Seattle, Mesa College, Saddleback College, and The Oakwood School, and has given presentations at annual conferences of the International Society for Improvised Music (ISIM), the California Art Education Association (CAEA), and the Music Association of California Community Colleges (MACCC). He has been a featured performer at the Festival of New Trumpet Music in New York City, Clean Feed Festival (New York), Aperitivo in Concerto (Milan), Le Mandala (Toulouse), Is That Jazz? Festival (Seattle), Trummerflora Spring Reverb Festival (San Diego), The Outpost Creative Soundspace Festival (Albuquerque), JazzPOP at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), NMASS Festival (Austin), Line Space Line Festival of Improvised Music (Los Angeles), Slow Sound Festival (Long Beach), and the Bakersfield Jazz Festival.
Also active as a concert organizer, Kris co-founded and curated the Okiro Creative and Experimental Arts Series in Hollywood from 2002-03 and he has organized performances in the Bakersfield area for over a decade. He recently founded Epigraph Records, an independent vinyl-only record label dedicated to the documentation of new creative music recorded live in Bakersfield.
Download: Curriculum Vitae
Press Photos
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photo credit: tiflin
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photo credit: Allen D. Glass II
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photo credit: Debbie Lewis
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