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trumpets


"Trumpeter Kris Tiner can turn barbed wire to beauty..."
–Greg Burk, LA WEEKLY

"Tiner in particular is a really compelling voice, blending the timbral resourcefulness of
Smoker or Wadada with the focused linear constructions of, say, Booker Little."
–Jason Bivins, CADENCE MAGAZINE

"Tiner plays through a spectrum of tones and approaches..."
–Rex Butters, ALL ABOUT JAZZ LOS ANGELES

"Tiner's trumpet and flugelhorn work is both conversational and eliptical,
much like Bill Dixon's in its unhurried examination of space."
–Larry Nai, CADENCE MAGAZINE

"Peerless technique with a rigorous, Miles-like economy,
and a folksy sort of lyricism that one does not usually find in avant-jazz."
–Dave Wayne, JAZZREVIEW.COM

"Tiner’s trumpet is hot and brittle, and his phrasing combines fleet,
boppish runs with fat smears and Don Ayler-esque multiphonics."
–Clifford Allen, BAGATELLEN

"Extraordinarily inventive... suggesting still-untapped potentials in Miles Davis’s legacy –
it’s as if Tiner has plumbed the most daring, piercing moments in Davis’s music to propose
a boldface musical language utterly different from the usual stylized fragility of Miles disciples."
–Nate Dorward, SIGNAL TO NOISE

"Tiner's timbre is brassy and full, capable of tranquility, but prone to pugnacious elation..."
–Troy Collins, CADENCE MAGAZINE


KRIS TINER (b. 1977) is active on the West Coast as a trumpet player, composer, and improviser. His music has been described as "extraordinarily inventive" by Signal to Noise magazine, Cadence Magazine calls him "a really compelling voice," and LA Weekly jazz critic Greg Burk claims, "Trumpeter Kris Tiner can turn barbed wire to beauty." He has performed at concert venues and festivals throughout North America and in Europe and West Africa and he appears on over 35 recordings. His own projects have been released on the Clean Feed, pfMENTUM, Nine Winds, and Evander Music labels and are regularly featured on jazz radio stations throughout the world. In addition to numerous interdisciplinary collaborations involving dance, poetry and 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 and Comedy Central.

Kris has studied and performed in a wide range of classical, jazz, and popular styles as well as traditional music from Latin America, West Africa, Indonesia, and North India. Incorporating ideas from the fields of Integral Studies and transpersonal psychology, his compositions explore connections between various world improvisational music systems and contemporary compositional practices. As a composer-improviser, Kris has been the recipient of awards from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), the American Composers Forum, Chamber Music America’s French-American Jazz Exchange, the International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE), and the Kennedy Center's Jazz Ahead program.

His primary musical projects include the Empty Cage Quartet - a collaborative new jazz ensemble that has been hailed as "one of the most powerful and appealing jazz units currently active" (–All About Jazz), and TIN/BAG - a duo with Brooklyn guitarist Mike Baggetta that deals with a spare, ethereal, and highly exploratory music, "clearly cut from cloth that hasn't been designed yet..." (–Improvijazzation Nation). Kris is a regular member of the Industrial Jazz Group and the Los Angeles Trumpet Quartet, and he has collaborated with a broad range of creative musicians including Vinny Golia, Wadada Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, Gerry Hemingway, Nels Cline, Ken Filiano, Kraig Grady, Tatsuya Nakatani, Jeff Kaiser, G.E. Stinson, Steuart Liebig, Hans W. Koch, Pete Christlieb, Michael Vlatkovich, Joe LaBarbera, Harris Eisenstadt, Lukas Ligeti, Aurelien Besnard, 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 CSU Bakersfield. 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 has also taught at CSU Bakersfield, Taft College, and the Academy of Creative Education in Los Angeles, and has been a guest lecturer/clinician at CalArts and The Oakwood School as well as at numerous high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools throughout Southern California. He 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), and was a performer at the IAJE Conference in 2007. In September of 2008 Kris will be a featured performer at the Sixth Annual Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT) in New York City.

Also active as a concert organizer, Kris co-founded and curated the Okiro Creative and Experimental Arts Series in Hollywood from 2002-03 and currently curates a jazz and new music concert series at Metro Galleries in Bakersfield.