Kris Tiner, Scott Walton, Donald Robinson at In The Flow Festival, Sacramento, May 14, 2012 (photo by George Thomson)

Kris Tiner – trumpet, compositions
Scott Walton – acoustic bass
Donald Robinson – drum set

Kris Tiner is a California-based trumpet player, composer, and improviser. Featured on NPR Music as one of five new trumpet voices impacting modern music, he 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.” 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. His 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, Montalvo Arts Center, and the John F. Kennedy Center. He is a member of the acclaimed Empty Cage Quartet, and he collaborates with New York guitarist Mike Baggetta in the duo Tin/Bag. Tiner has performed with the Industrial Jazz Group, Vinny Golia, Wadada Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, Donald Robinson, Nels Cline, Ken Filiano, Kraig Grady, Tatsuya Nakatani, Taylor Ho Bynum, G.E. Stinson, Chris Schlarb, Motoko Honda, Harris Eisenstadt, Sara Schoenbeck, and Lukas Ligeti. Tiner 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 lectured on both music and visual art, and currently teaches courses in jazz and American popular music at Bakersfield College. He recently founded Epigraph Records, an independent label dedicated to the documentation of new creative music recorded live in Bakersfield.

Bassist and pianist Scott Walton‘s interests cut across musical genres. He has collaborated with poets, dancers, performance artists, filmmakers, and multimedia artists, and is featured on recent CD releases with the Vinny Golia Quintet (One, Three, Two), Cosmologic (Syntaxis), O’Keefe, Stanyek, Walton, Whitehead (Tunnel), and Jeff Kaiser (17 Themes for Ockodektet). As a pianist Walton is currently performing an improvisationally inspired interpretation of Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata. As a bassist he has recorded with George Lewis, Bobby Bradford, Anthony Davis, and Carmell Jones, and has performed with Wadada Leo Smith, John Carter, J.D. Parran, Gerry Hemingway, Quincy Troupe, Ray Anderson, John Abercrombie, Phillip Gelb, Davey Williams, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Clifford Jordan, Al Cohn, Buddy Tate, and Frank Wess, among others. He has recorded on the Soul Note, Nine Winds, Jazz’halo, Circumvention, pfMentum, Koch, Centaur, Albany, and Revelation labels.

Described as a “percussive dervish” (Coda), Donald Robinson is a technical master of the drums. He is a stalwart of the of San Francisco bay area avant-garde jazz scene, playing and recording with many of the area’s improvisational players, from saxophonists John Tchicai, Marco Eneidi and Larry Ochs to koto player Miya Masaoka and pianist Matthew Goodheart, and with prominent visitors like Cecil Taylor, Wadada Leo Smith, George Lewis, trumpeter Raphe Malik and Canadian pianist Paul Plimley. Much of this work has featured the combination of Robinson and bassist Lisle Ellis as rhythm section: ‘the best bass-drums tag team on the scene’ (Jazz Times). His longest musical association, dating from the 1970’s, was with the late tenor saxophonist Glenn Spearman. Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1953, Robinson first studied classical percussion at the New England Conservatory. During the early 1970’s he served his musical apprenticeship in the jazz world of Paris, studying with Kenny Clarke and playing with Alan Silva, Anthony Braxton, Oliver Lake and Bobby Few among many others. He first played with Spearman as a duet partner during this period in Paris, an association which continued through various configurations and many recordings until the saxophonist’s death in 1998. Robinson is currently playing in many configurations with a broad range of musicians throughout Europe and the US.