Ian Carey is a trumpeter, composer, arranger, bandleader and instructor, who “asks deep musical questions and comes up with compelling answers” (Bill Kirchner, editor, The Oxford Companion to Jazz). Born in 1974 in Binghamton, New York, Carey grew up in a house suffused with music and art. Ian’s first musical outlet was singing in a church choir, where his exposure to a brass quintet turned his eye to the trumpet. He started on cornet and French horn in elementary school, but switched back to trumpet for good in high school after his family relocated to Folsom, California (site of a now-famous high school jazz program). He studied trumpet with Sacramento jazz icon Tom Peron and spent many evenings soaking up the sounds of local musicians including Jessica Williams, Joe Gilman, Jimmy Robinson, and Bud Spangler. Two years of classical trumpet studies at the University of Nevada in Reno gave Carey the opportunity to play with visiting artists Eddie Daniels and Ernie Watts, and with the Reno Philharmonic. Transferring to The New School in New York City in 1994, he studied trumpet with Cecil Bridgewater, Vincent Penzarella, Charles Tolliver, Laurie Frink, and John McNeil, and composition with Bill Kirchner, Henry Martin, and Maria Schneider. He honed his improvisational chops in small group classes with Joanne Brackeen, Andrew Cyrille, Billy Harper, and Reggie Workman, and during the next seven years he had opportunities to perform with a diverse group of players including Ravi Coltrane, Ted Curson, Eddie Bert, Gregoire Maret, Loren Schoenberg, Rory Stuart, Marion Brown, Ali Jackson, Aaron Alexander, and Eugene Osborne Smith. After graduating from the New School with a B.A. in Jazz and Contemporary Music, he spent five years with a night job as a proofreader, which left him little time for to sit in at jam sessions and gather with colleagues, let alone pursue gigs. “It was incredibly stimulating, but you end up having to take something totally unrelated to music, and that got very frustrating,” Carey recalls. When a friend hooked him up with a sublet in San Francisco in 2001, he was ready for a break from the Gotham grind. “I felt right away that this was a better situation,” Carey says. “I met good players right away and started playing. And I lucked into some design work that was much more creative than what I’d been doing in New York.” Quickly recognized as a formidable improviser, Carey performed around the Bay Area with top-notch ensembles like the Contemporary Jazz Orchestra, guitarist Mike Irwin Johnson’s 8 Legged Monster, Adam Theis’ Realistic Orchestra, Matt Small's Crushing Spiral Ensemble, accordionist Rob Reich’s Circus Bella All-Star Band, and shared the stage with vocalist Betty Fu, pianists Ben Stolorow and the late B.J. Papa, saxophonists Dayna Stephens and Noel Jewkes, as well as visiting luminaries including pianist/composer Satoko Fujii and vocalist/composer Molly Thompson. But his ambition was always to create a band focusing on his original material. He got the chance when he landed a regular spot at Financial District watering hole The House of Shields in 2002. The gig lasted for four years, enough time to develop a book of some 40 original tunes. He first documented the group on 2005’s Sink/Swim, an impressive debut session featuring pianist Adam Shulman, saxophonist and flautist Evan Francis, bassist Fred Randolph, and drummer Jon Arkin. By the time he released 2010’s critically hailed Contextualizin', the band had consciously sidestepped the hard-bop sound by foregrounding Francis’s highly accomplished flute work. In developing the music for Roads & Codes, his third album on his Kabocha Records label, Carey wanted to explore more intricate writing, and move further away from head-solo-head conventions, so he recruited saxophonist Kasey Knudsen to expand the group to a “Quintet+1” format. “Something I learned from Maria Schneider is to tailor solo sections to strengths of the player,” Carey says. “I don’t just have everyone play over the same changes. Many tunes have two or three different solo sections.” Featuring original compositions as well as new treatments of works by Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky, and Neil Young, along with original comic-book-inspired cover art by Carey (who day-lights as a designer and illustrator), Roads & Codes was a critical success, garnering praise from DownBeat (”a highly skilled band of improvisers... 4-1/2 stars”), Doug Ramsey's Rifftides (”keep[s] the listener’s attention not through volume, velocity and extended sorties into the stratosphere, but with storytelling and a burnished tone”), NPR's California Report (”the work of a musician pursuing his own thoughtful, painterly vision”), and author Ted Gioia (”a very underrated player, and a talent to watch”), and turning up on multiple “best of 2013” lists. Carey's next project was a distinct change of pace: he teamed up with his friend and longtime collaborator pianist Ben Stolorow to release 2014's Duocracy, an intimate collection of standards from the well-known (”How Long Has This Been Going On?” and “All the Things You Are”) to the less- frequently heard (”Little White Lies” and Mancini's “Two for the Road”). “It’s super-naked, and that was intimidating at first, especially once the tape started rolling, but it’s also really freeing. On my last album I felt like I was trying to build something perfect,” Carey says, referring to Roads & Codes. “This was about going in and enjoying playing with each other, about playing jazz and seeing what we could come up with, and letting these tunes shine.” Duocracy received praise from DownBeat (”a lively trip down a straightahead path, never veering far from the expected route but obviously deriving a refreshing joy from the familiar sights”), and Jazz Weekly (”Carey’s got a big, fat and wondrous tone and he fills the room while Stolorow mixes stride chords and bop lines to perfection”). In 2013 Carey received a grant from the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music to compose a new four-movement suite, titled “Interview Music,” for his Quintet+1 (this time with multi-reed master Sheldon Brown taking the place of Evan Francis, who has since departed for New York), which will be premiered September 20, 2014 at the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley. And in July 2014, he was among the runners-up in the “Rising Star” trumpet category of the 62nd DownBeat Critic's Poll. “Sometime when I was in my twenties,” Carey says, “I realized that there are so many great, amazing players out there that the context in which I do what I'm doing is going to be how I differentiate myself, and for me that's writing my own tunes and doing my own things within them. I really love learning old jazz tunes and learning all the things you're supposed to know, but I feel like you can do that forever and never catch up to the greats. You have to say at some point, ‘This is my thing, and I'm gonna do my thing.'”
Awards
Runner-up nominee, Rising Star (Trumpet), 2013 & 2014 DownBeat Critics' Poll.
2014 Musical Artists Award, Pasquina Publishing.
"Roads & Codes": Best of 2013 - DownBeat Magazine (4 1/2
stars); Scott Albin; James Hale; Andrew Gilbert (NPR); Ted
Gioia (hon. mention); Arnaldo DeSouteiro.
Gear
1956 Martin Committee #3,
Monette B3FS7
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