Event Detail

UC San Diego Assistant Professor of Music Stephanie Richards will lead a performance of her quintet at the Loft. The performance will feature Richards (trumpet), Chris Speed (saxophone), Michael Dessen (trombone), Mark Dresser (bass) and Andrew Munsey (drums).

In an April 2016 review of Richards' performance style, NBC's SoundDiego said that Richards “left an indelible impression — her tone limber and personal, and her ideas deftly executed.” (Click here for the full review.)

Traveling the spaces between new music, improvisation and performance art, the Brooklyn-based trumpeter and composer Stephanie Richards examines the physical, visual and auditory interactions of live music performance. As reflected in her recently commissioned works Rotations (for 12 choreographed musicians and carousel organ) and Trading Futures (for 600 choreographed found sound surfaces), Richards' theatrical tendencies often result in compositional collaborations of sound, sight and movement.

Richards has become a prominent voice in experimental improvisation, collaborating with pioneering artists like Henry Threadgill, Butch Morris, John Zorn and Anthony Braxton, composer Helmut Lachenmann and performance artists Mike Kelly, Laurie Anderson and Yoko Ono. As a founding member of Asphalt Orchestra, created by the new music collective Bang on a Can, Richards has worked with David Byrne, St. Vincent, Susan Marshall, Tyondai Braxton and others. She has also performed alongside the Kronos Quartet, the Pixies, Kanye West, A-Trak and Common.

As a champion for new music, Richards has premiered her own works from stages as varied as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center to smaller iconic New York stages like the Blue Note and the Stone. While her performances survey a panorama of musical genres ranging from free improvisation, jazz, hip hop and punk to contemporary classical music, it is the collaboration with space and surface that unifies Richards’ creative pursuits. She holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music, McGill University and California Institute of the Arts and has held a residency at Stanford University. A member of the music faculty at University of California San Diego's Department of Music, Richards continues to encourage the performance and commissioning of jazz and new music as vice president of the Festival of New Trumpet (FONT) alongside trumpeter Dave Douglas.