3 Questions for Scott Tinkler [VIDEO]

In these short interviews I ask musicians and composers, from various backgrounds, the same three simple questions about music.
  1. Why do you have music in your life?
  2. How do you make music?
  3. What excites you musically right now?

I will be presenting these once a week over the next few months with local, national and international musicians and composers.

In this episode I’m talking to Scott Tinkler

Scott Tinkler is one of the most exciting and formidable trumpet improvising musicians in the world. He has collaborated with a range of international artists over the past decade including Jason Moran, Tim Berne, Mark Helias, Anthony Burr, Tony Buck, Oscar Noriega and Han Bennink.

In 2003 Tinkler travelled with his long time associate Paul Grabowsky to New York to record an album of Grabowsky’s original music with Branford Marsalis, Joe Lovano, Ed Schuller and Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts. Tales of Time and Space was released on the Warner label to stunning reviews, many highlighting Tinkler’s unique contribution to Grabowsky’s music.

In 2006 Tinkler attended the Garma Festival, which celebrates the cultural inheritance of the Yolngu People, the indigenous Australians of Northeast Arnhem Land. The festival is held at Gulkula, near Yirrkala in the Australian outback. At this festival Tinkler collaborated with musicians from the Wagalik group, performing and workshopping. Tinkler has since been involved in touring and performing with these musicians in collaboration with the Australian Art Orchestra.

Current projects include Chiri with the Australian drummer Simon Barker, Korean Pansori singer Bae Il Dong. In 2011, at the invitation of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, Chiri toured Korea, Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, Cyprus and Jordan, North Korea, followed by a performance at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and two tours of Korea in 2012.

Tinkler has done a range of projects with the composer and violinist John Rodgers, working in ensembles such as Ellision, Hydromus Krysogast and the Antripodean Collective. Notably, Rodgers composed Glass, a concerto featuring Tinkler as soloist performed with the London Sinfonietta, which premiered at the 2010 Adelaide Festival of Arts.

He plays regularly in Australia in duos, trios and quartets with musicians including Marc Hannaford, Simon Barker, Paul Grabowsky, Erkki Veltheim, Ken Eadie and Carl Dewhurst.

Tinkler is also involved in an ongoing solo project that uses extended and prepared techniques; his first solo trumpet album called Backwards was released by Extreme in 2007.

In the early 1990s, Tinkler performed and studied with Australian tenor saxophonist, Mark Simmonds. Simmonds introduced Tinkler to extended practice on the cycle of 5ths using many harmonic substitutions involving the diminished substitution theory, rhythm cycles and polyrhythms as a basis for his highly fuelled jazz-based music, which can be traced to earlier developments by John Coltrane.

Throughout Tinkler’s career he has been interested in not only exploring and developing improvised music stemming from jazz, but also other forms of music and the cultures they come from. This has led to musical collaborations with Indian and Korean musicians, as well as with indigenous musicians from Australia.

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