For Your Grammy Consideration: John Bailey – Best Improvised Jazz Solo/Best Jazz Instrumental Album/Best Instrumental Composition

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

"Triplicity" –  Best Improvised Jazz Solo

In Real Time – Best Jazz Instrumental Album

"Lovely Planet" – Best Instrumental Composition

JOHN BAILEY – In Real Time (Summit Records)

Featuring

Stacy Dillard, saxophone

John Hart, guitar

Cameron Brown, bass

Victor Lewis, drums

Debut album as a leader from acclaimed 52-year-old trumpeter Bailey – an in-demand NYC sideman – earns critical acclaim

"In Real Time, John Bailey (Summit Records), reveals a trumpeter in his prime, reeling off runs and phrases with consummate technique and admirable logic."

– George Kanzler, Hot House Jazz Guide

“The bandleader’s tone on In Real Time is warm and his improvisations brim with fluid, rhythmic agility while retaining a sense of melodic cogency and harmonic invention.  Inside all of that lies a maturity that comes across through his well-paced soloing and suspenseful phrasing.  He knows how to pen delightful material, too.”

– John Murph, DownBeat

John Bailey - In Real Time (SUMMIT RECORDS 2018)

Bailey is no newcomer to jazz: In Real Time, released June 8, 2018 via Summit Records, is his first album as a leader after more than 30 years as one of the busiest sidemen in the business. 

A trumpet prodigy, Bailey's spectacular gifts began to be noticed as a high school musician in 1984 when DownBeat Magazine cited him in its annual Student Music Awards for outstanding performances in both the classical and jazz trumpet categories, noting “Shades of Wynton!” The same year, he was a finalist in the National Foundation for Advancements in the Arts (NFAA) Arts Recognition and Talent Search, along with Donny McCaslin and Bill Charlap. He also won the National Association of Jazz Educators’ Youth Talent Contest. Later, as a senior at the Eastman School of Music, he won DownBeat’s Best Instrumental Soloist award. 

“My natural inclination has always been to draw from as many different sources as possible,” he explains. As a child of the 1960s, he learned from Dizzy, Miles and Bird, and was mentored by the legendary multi-instrumentalist Ira Sullivan who wrote the liner notes for this album. He was also influenced by artists as diverse as Jethro Tull, The Beach Boys, classical trumpeter Maurice Andre, and the Chicago Symphony brass section. “Duke Ellington said it best,” says Bailey. “There are only two kinds of music: good music and the other kind.” 

Through seven originals and two Brazilian covers (by Milton Nascimento and Gilberto Gil), In Real Time shows unusual range. From the straight-ahead and boppish, to elegiac ballads and cerebral post-bop flights, his goal is to make the music deep and wide-ranging. In each tune, regardless of where the music takes him, Bailey's ebullient personality shines through. 

Known as one of the most eclectic trumpet players in New York City, Bailey is an in-demand musician and teaching artist on call for everything from traditional jazz, to R&B and pop, to classical. He became a member of The Buddy Rich Band while still in college, and his career has included long-running gigs with Ray Charles, master conguero and bandleader Ray Barretto, Max Weinberg and Frank Sinatra, Jr. His work with Latin Jazz innovator Arturo O'Farrill won two Grammy awards for the albums The Offense of the Drum and Cuba - The Conversation Continues. He has played on more than 70 albums and, as a jazz educator, has taught at the University of Miami and Florida International University.