Kris Tiner

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, NBC, Comedy Central, and NPR.

Kris has performed in a wide range of classical, jazz, and popular styles as well as various improvisational and electro-acoustic formats, and he has studied 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 improvisational world 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 explores “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, Jeff Kaiser, Anne LeBaron, G.E. Stinson, Steuart Liebig, Chris Schlarb, Hans W. Koch, Pete Christlieb, 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 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 visiting lecturer/clinician/performer at CalArts, Bennington College, Mesa College, Saddleback College and The Oakwood School as well as at numerous high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools throughout Southern California. He has maintained a private trumpet studio teaching students of all ages since 1995. Kris 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 he has been a featured performer at the Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT) in New York City, the IAJE Conference, Clean Feed Festival, Trummerflora Spring Reverb Festival, Ventura New Music Festival, The Outpost Creative Soundspace Festival, Mateel Summer Arts and Music Festival, Angel City Jazz Festival, 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 currently curates a jazz and new music concert series at Metro Galleries in Bakersfield.