Please visit my website!
I'm Brian. I play the saxophone. I also like to write music and play around on various other instruments. You know, for giggles.
I was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and lived there until coming to the Dallas area to study music at the University of North Texas. I tour and record with Snarky Puppy, a creative jazz-funk-fusion band that incorporates some of my favorite musicians in the world. Two of the clips on this page, "Making the Circle" and "Strange Dream," are live recordings from our Spring 2008 tour of North America. We've recently had the privilege of playing with some great artists like Keith Carlock, Chris Cheek, Henry Hey, Tim Lefebvre, Ari Hoenig, Zach Brock, Chris Tarry, Dan Weiss, Pete McCann, the Neville Brothers, Victor Wooten, and many more.
I've gotten to play and record with some other great musicians over the years, in Snarky Puppy as well as on my own. These include Phil Woods, Rufus Reid, Pete Christlieb, Bill Holman, Benny Golson, Bernard Wright, Lou Marini, Wayne Bergeron, Robert "Sput" Searight, and others.
I left a couple of my favorite tunes from my March 14 recital on here in addition to the Snarky stuff. The recital was recorded by my good friend Thomas Woods, who's a great sound engineer, piano player, and arranger. You should hire him for something. The group that I somehow managed to convince to play my recital is one of my favorite groups of people to play with in the universe: Tim Goynes (g), Jiri Levicek (p), Daniel Foose (b), and Ross Pederson (d). Many of these guys also play with my good friend, vocalist Hildegunn Gjedrem, whose album just came out and sounds fantastic.
The two tunes by my friend Dan Bruce that were on here earlier this year are gone, but you can check out his website or myspace if you want to listen to and/or buy his album.
All of the audio samples on this page have a way lower bitrate than they should due to space limitations on Myspace, so if you want higher quality samples of all of my stuff go to my website, www.donomation.com . For more Snarky tunes, check out our myspace, or search for us on itunes. We're all over the interweb.
Many thanks to Bill Ellison from the Granada Theater for the picture of me playing soprano with a crazy blue-purple glow.
