RILEY MULHERKAR
Trumpeter Riley Mulherkar is best known as a key member of The Westerlies, a New York-based brass quartet of (as the name implies) West Coast expats who play a mix of jazz, modern classical and folk compositions, high on tunefulness. This deep admiration for the American songbook can also be heard all over Riley, the solo debut by the 32 year-old Mulherkar (pronounced Mull-HAIR-kerr). But love of song is only half of the album’s primary pull. The other is the sonically modern setting for Mulherkar’s vulnerable, melodious interpretation of this rich tradition, a 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. It’s a radically bold audio framework for the emotional pronouncements of Riley’s horn.
“Our mantra,” says the trumpeter, “was to make a record that sounds how jazz makes me feel — even if it doesn’t sound like jazz all the time. How, when I hear King Oliver, I feel the momentum shift, how hard the beat drops, and how hard Jelly Roll Morton’s going on the piano. That’s the emotion I get. We wanted to try to create a world that conveys this feeling in its own way.”
Mulherkar has been physically moved by jazz from a young age. He was just eight years-old when he began seeing the Garfield High School big-band play free gigs in his Seattle neighborhood; it’s one of the reasons he picked up the trumpet. Soon enough he himself was at Garfield, a beacon of the city’s public-school music education, having through the years enrolled everyone from Quincy Jones and Jimi Hendrix, to Kassa Overall and Macklemore. By the time Juilliard and the Big Apple beckoned, Riley had come up on the radar of no less a trumpet luminary than Wynton Marsalis, who became a mentor. He arrived in New York, at the famed arts conservatory with the express concern of winding up a jazz musician, immersing himself in the tradition through studies with Marsalis and soon enough, with the late Frank Kimbrough, who also became a confidant.
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