On February 18-19 I teamed up with two tremendously creative West Coast trumpeters (Dan Clucas and Jeff Kaiser) to welcome the great East Coast cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum to town for, believe it or not, his Los Angeles debut. Our first meeting was for a set on Hans Fjellestad‘s ResBox series at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood, and the following day we were invited to CalArts to do a performance and discussion for Wadada Leo Smith‘s graduate program in African-American Improvisational Music. This was the program I graduated from back in 2003, and so it was a great honor to be invited back.

Both performances were overwhelmingly positive experiences and everyone is talking about putting this together again at some point. Thanks to Jeff Kaiser, Keith McMullen, and Louis Lopez for the photos above; unfortunately there was no audio or video documentation, but you can imagine what kind of sounds were swirling…