Photo by Aviva Diamond
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.” 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 and his 90+ recordings 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 by the California Music Educators Association as the statewide jazz educator of the year.
Tiner has toured widely with the Empty Cage Quartet, hailed by NPR Music as “a thoroughly modern and multifaceted jazz ensemble that stakes out a singular voice.” Their 2008 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. He collaborates with guitarist Mike Baggetta in the duo Tin/Bag; their album Bridges was chosen as one of the ten best jazz recordings of 2011 in Time Out New York. Tiner is a member of the Cathlene Pineda Quartet, Chris Schlarb’s Psychic Temple, the Industrial Jazz Group, the Bakersfield Jazz Orchestra, and the Bakersfield Symphony Orchestra. He has performed with Wadada Leo Smith, Vinny Golia, Tatsuya Nakatani, Kraig Grady, Nels Cline, Joe La Barbera, Lukas Ligeti, Donald Robinson, Charles Gaines, Angelica Sanchez, Gianni Gebbia, Jeff Kaiser, Lisa Mezzacappa, Phillip Greenlief, Nate Wooley, Lucian Ban, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Jeff Parker, Taylor Ho Bynum, Sara Schoenbeck, Harris Eisenstadt, Jeff Coffin, and Michael Vlatkovich. 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), 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, Okiro Large Ensemble, and numerous solo artists.
Tiner is Professor of Music at Bakersfield College, where he directs the DownBeat award-winning Jazz Studies program. 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, the California Art Education Association, and the Music Association of California Community Colleges. 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, Kobla Ladzekpo, and Morton Subotnick. Prior to that he earned a BA in Music at CSU Bakersfield, studying trumpet with Charles Brady and composition with Doug Davis. As a student he participated in Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead residency program at The Kennedy Center, and was twice awarded the highest individual honor at the Pacific Coast Collegiate Jazz Festival. He was inducted into the CSUB Alumni Hall of Fame in 2023. 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.
Kris Tiner is an endorsing artist for Curry Precision Mouthpieces and Torpedo Bags trumpet cases.
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Curriculum Vitae | Press Photos | Bios for Print | Discography
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REVIEWS
“Trumpeter Kris Tiner can turn barbed wire to beauty.”
– Greg Burk, LA Weekly
“Kris Tiner is a superbly fluid trumpeter, with a clean articulation in the upper register, deft valving, and a winning lyrical bent.”
– Jason Bivins, Cadence Magazine
“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 Magazine
“Smart, kicking and as natural as a heartbeat… an unaffected, personalized amalgam of the most significant creative (as opposed to political) developments in jazz from the past several years.”
– Chris Kelsey, JazzTimes
“Kris Tiner’s trumpet is perfectly suited to the moment… Tiner painting around Pineda’s chords for supreme emotional affect across the album really is the most noteworthy feature of the music.”
– Dave Cantor, DownBeat
“Tiner has the incredible power to make his trumpet tone wail like Lester Bowie could, in an almost human-like fashion, stretching the tone, and then bending it upwards like a blues guitar string, or just – equally Bowie-esque, producing low bluesy grumbles alternated with crystal-clear joyful jubilation.”
– Stef Gijssels, The Free Jazz Collective
“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 timbre is brassy and full, capable of tranquility, but prone to pugnacious elation…”
– Troy Collins, Cadence Magazine
“Trumpeter Kris Tiner is inventive in his interpretation of the music, using soft muted tones which contrast with his more forceful open flourishes to alter the atmosphere and feeling.”
– Matthew Wright, Jazz Journal (UK)
“Trumpeter Kris Tiner and guitarist Mike Baggetta give their lyricism all the space it needs to expand and interact in lovely plaints that can’t help but get inside your heart.”
– Greg Burk, MetalJazz.com
“Tiner plays through a spectrum of tones and approaches.”
– Rex Butters, All About Jazz
“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
“A big part of the sound on the album is trumpeter Kris Tiner’s, which can at turns sound elated, mournful and soulful all within the span of a few bars.”
– Cesareo Garasa, The Bakersfield Californian
“They make small gestures extend their impact. Brass player Tiner uses mutes to amend his sound and string man Baggetta employs a variety of picking techniques to assure his sonic breadth. But the charm comes from the allure of a poetic sensibility. There’s lots of open space to digest the last smoky phrase or a recent exclamation point.”
– Jim Macnie, Lament For A Straight Line
“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’s hungry enthusiasm and obvious joy for the music is apparent.”
– Gene Armstrong, Tucson Weekly
“They make patient music — it unfolds slowly, but it’s not sleepy. Tiner’s tone and phrasing show the influence of Miles Davis… Baggetta is just as contemplative as Tiner as they navigate together between jazz, art music and different traditional musics. Don’t be surprised if they slip an ingenious country cover into the set.”
– Stephen Trageser, Nashville Scene
“Definitely a winner… It takes courage to make music this sensitive. It requires insight and good taste to be this sensitive without falling into the abyss of sentimentalism. It takes strength to reduce the feelings and musings to their bare essence, like a Japanese zen-drawing with only a few lines and lots of white space. Tiner’s tone is warm and precise, pure and velvety, subtle and nuanced. It takes a lot of artistry to produce something so personal with such universal value.”
– Stef Gijssels, The Free Jazz Collective
“The music is deeply introspective, even in its louder moments, and is simply beautiful. The subtle drama of Tiner’s spare and well-paced lines take on sharp definition…”
– Daniel Barbiero, Avant Music News
“Trumpeter Kris Tiner has a beautifully clear swing-to-freebop sound and a gift for phrases that hang provocatively in the air.”
– Nate Dorward, Exclaim! Canada’s Music Authority
“Tiner’s trumpet and flugelhorn work is both conversational and elliptical, much like Bill Dixon’s in its unhurried examination of space.”
– Larry Nai, Cadence Magazine
“A brilliant trumpet player… Tiner’s tone is unusually warm, welcoming and deeply felt.”
– Stef Gijssels, The Free Jazz Collective
“Excellent… trumpeter Kris Tiner and guitarist Mike Baggetta explore abstract yet jazz-derived realms of expansive lyricism and liquid melody.”
– Time Out New York
“California-based Kris Tiner feeds off the energy of others with his compositions. The Empty Cage Quartet, in particular, is a thoroughly modern and multifaceted jazz ensemble that stakes out a singular voice… For Tiner, his trumpet technique is part of the bigger piece, a function to the whole.”
– Lars Gotrich, NPR Music
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SELECTED PERFORMANCE VENUES
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The Stone, New York, NY |
Castillo/Corrales, Paris, France Le Mandala, Toulouse, France I’Klectik Art Lab, London, England Baloard, Montpellier, France Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT High Mayhem, Santa Fe, NM Elastic Arts, Chicago, IL Clawhammer Music and Arts Festival, Oshkosh, WI Goodbye Blue Monday, Brooklyn, NY Chris’ Jazz Cafe, Philadelphia, PA Barking Legs Theater, Chattanooga, TN Ventura New Music Festival, Ventura, CA Aroma Spring Jazz Festival, Idyllwild, CA Outpost Creative Soundspace Festival, Albuquerque, NM Luggage Store Gallery New Music Series, San Francisco, CA 12 Miles West Arts Center, Bloomfield, NJ so.cal.sonic Festival, Long Beach, CA CASMEC, Sacramento, CA Dazzle, Denver, CO Khon’s, Houston, TX Pilot Light, Knoxville, TN Elliot Street Pub, Atlanta, GA Jimmy Can’t Dance, Louisville, KY Ann Arbor District Library, Ann Arbor, MI The Knitting Factory, Hollywood, CA Friday Night Jazz at LACMA, Los Angeles, CA SASSAS Sound. at the Schindler House, Hollywood, CA Mateel Summer Arts and Music Festival, Garberville, CA LA Sounds New Music Festival, Goethe-Institut, Los Angeles, CA Zeitgeist Concert Series, Mat Bevel Institute, Tucson, AZ The Roost Creative Music Series, Albuquerque, NM Line Space Line Festival, Los Angeles, CA The Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, Washington D.C. Bakersfield Jazz Festival, CSU Bakersfield, Bakersfield, CA Gold Lion Arts, Sacramento, CA Art Share LA, Los Angeles, CA Medicine for Nightmares, San Francisco, CA Kulak’s Woodshed, North Hollywood, CA Sunspace, Los Angeles, CA 2220 Arts & Archives, Los Angeles, CA Bootleg Theater, Los Angeles, CA |
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ARTIST IN RESIDENCE / VISITING ARTIST
| Durham University, Durham, England Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA ICIT New Ears Series at UC Irvine, Irvine, CA University of New Mexico Arts Lab, Albuquerque, NM Scottsdale Community College, Scottsdale, AZ The Art Institute of Seattle, Seattle, WA Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn, NY Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID University of Nevada, Reno, Reno, NV Los Angeles Harbor College, Wilmington, CA The Oakwood School, North Hollywood, CA CSU Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA CSU Long Beach, Long Beach, CA Los Angeles City College, Los Angeles, CA |
Bennington College, Bennington, VT UC Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA Northwestern University, Evanston, IL Academy of Creative Education, North Hollywood, CA The Center for Improvisational Music, New York, NY UCSD Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, San Diego, CA East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA CSU San Marcos, San Marcos, CA CSU Bakersfield, Bakersfield, CA Mesa College, San Diego, CA Saddleback College, Mission Viejo, CA The Jazz School, Berkeley, CA Fresno State University, Fresno, CA CSU Northridge, Northridge, CA |