Steph Richards Neon Lights:
“A rising force in avant-garde jazz” (Jazz Times), trumpeter Steph Richards is a radical innovator in the avant and experimental scenes. She has worked with pioneering artists ranging from Henry Threadgill and Anthony Braxton to David Byrne and Yoko Ono and her compositions have premiered across the North America and Europe on stages as iconic and varied as Carnegie Hall, the Blue-note and Lincoln Center. In 2008 she developed a close mentorship with the late Butch Morris, innovator of the Conduction language and has since taken up the baton to champion Morris' language. Steph has since conducted her own Conduction ensembles across the US, Europe and Mexico. Her 2019 record "Take The Neon Lights" received wide acclaim with the New York Times calling it "boldly inventive" Downbeat proclaiming Richards "a virtuoso of nonlinear trumpet playing". Take the Neon Lights was conceived as a lyric poem to New York City, with compositions exploring the grit and brilliance that the city has to offer. Song titles are named from poems by literary icons Maya Angelou, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg with the title track of set to Langston Hughes’ JukeBox Love Song.
For this engagement Steph leads an acoustic quartet that oscillates between dense complex structures and expansively vulnerable improvisations and features Joshua White (piano), Zack Lober (bass) and Andrew Munsey (drums). Steph is a Yamaha Artist.