Artistic Director
Trumpeter Riley Mulherkar is a founding member of The Westerlies, and in 2024 released his debut album Riley, hailed as “one of the best debut records to come out in a long, long time” (DownBeat). The trumpeter has had audiences on their feet since he was in middle school, as a prodigious and disciplined player soaking up everything he could from Seattle's unexpectedly rich and rooted jazz community. Playing under legendary band directors Robert Knatt and Clarence Acox prepared him for Juilliard, where he quickly found a musical home with Jazz at Lincoln Center and its leader, Wynton Marsalis. Since, he has played with everyone from Kenny Barron and Dee Dee Bridgewater to Anna Deavere Smith and Alan Cumming, and in 2020 received Lincoln Center’s prestigious Emerging Artist Award for his work as “an original bandleader, composer, arranger, educator, community activist and advocate for jazz and the arts.”
Leading countless jazz ensembles as "the sort of musician who sees improvised music as a perfect delivery system for joy," as writer Nate Chinen put it, Mulherkar also stretched outside the genre alongside The Westerlies, a new music brass quartet that creates the rarest of hybrids: music that is both “folk-like and composerly, lovely and intellectually rigorous” (NPR Music), with performances from Carnegie Hall to Coachella.
Riley, his opening recorded salvo as a soloist, is the sonically modern setting for Mulherkar’s vulnerable, melodious interpretation of this rich tradition with sound design shaped by producers Rafiq Bhatia and Chris Pattishall. Enveloping Mulherkar within a series of textured, intricately-crafted spaces, Bhatia and Pattishall train a cinematographer’s lens on the continuum of great old songs, as well as new Mulherkar pieces which fit right in. Described as “über hip, modern yet timeless” (DownBeat), it’s a radically bold audio framework for the emotional pronouncements of Riley’s horn.
Riley is an Edwards Artist and performs on Edwards trumpets.
"Ride or Die" by Riley Mulherkar from the album 'Riley' Coming February 16, 2024 on Westerlies Records