There are few experiences more exciting than catching a teenage artist on the cusp of renown, and this is the moment to savor the emergence of Skylar Tang.
The Foster City composer and multi-instrumentalist has spent the past few years as a stand-out trumpet soloist in elite ensembles like the SFJAZZ High School All-Stars and the Stanford Jazz Workshop 50/50 Jazz Orchestra. She earned a shot of national attention in 2023 with her pen when her piece “Kaleidoscope” won Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dr. J. Douglas White Composition and Arranging Contest.
Now enrolled at Columbia University and studying music at Juilliard, the 18-year-old Tang is back in town over winter break and playing her first run of gigs around the region as a bandleader. She performs Jan. 10 at the Sound Room in Oakland, Saturday at the SJZ Break Room, and Sunday at Mr. Tipple’s in San Francisco with her New York quartet.
“This is definitely a first for me,” Tang said. “I’ve done some one-offs under my own name, but they’ve been lowkey and casual. I put so much thought in this run. This is my first time with my own band. We’re all committed to the same vision.”
Her quartet features Lafayette-raised pianist Brahm Sasner, a bandmate from the SFJAZZ High School All-Stars Big Band who’s studying jazz at the Manhattan School of Music. She met bassist Ben Halle, a fellow student at Columbia, over the summer in Los Angeles. And she’s known New Jersey-raised drummer Ben Schwartz since they met in Carnegie Hall’s National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America in summer of 2022.
They bonded on the first day of rehearsal at Purchase College “when we started this conversation about when something is a sauce or a condiment. It’s quite perplexing. Instead of solving the mystery we decided to write some songs,” she recalled, noting that the quartet will be performing several of the pieces they devised, like “Habanero,” “a nice, groovy miner blues in 12/8 with a kick.”
Schwartz is also studying at Columbia, and the quartet has been playing together several times a week at neighboring Manhattan School of Music, “becoming really good friends,” Tang said. “It’s amazing we all ended up in the same place.”
In order to bring her New York band out to the Bay Area without going into debt she applied for a grant from YoungArts, a Miami-based foundation dedicated to supporting artists ages 15-18. The grant can be applied to support work of any kind, and for a young jazz artist there are few experiences more edifying than embracing the role of bandleader and all its attendant responsibilities.
“I think part of going to college is realizing we can do whatever we want,” Tang said. “The hard part is deciding what we want. That’s what the whole process of being a bandleader is in a sense. Emailing venues, organizing the gigs, logistics, marketing. That’s all been a huge learning experience.”
Tang closes her Bay Area run Jan. 17 at San Francisco’s Bird & Beckett Books & Records with Sasner on piano, New York bassist Ruby Farmer, and San Jose drummer Sylvia Cuenca, a veteran New York player with a decades-long track record accompanying jazz’s greatest improvisers.
Keeping company with established masters is nothing new for Tang. San Francisco bass star Marcus Shelby has been hiring her for gigs with his orchestra since she was 16. And in recent months she’s performed with bands led by saxophonists Kristen Strom and Michael O’Neill.
Saxophonist Dann Zinn, an eminent educator whose former students include award-winning heavyweights like saxophonist Dayna Stephens, Remy Le Boeuf, and Hitomi Oba, directed Tang during the four years she was a member of the SFJAZZ High School All-Stars Combo, a breakout group from the orchestra.
She was the youngest in the combo when she started, and the senior member in the 2023-24 season, and Zinn said without hesitation that “she’s probably the most brilliant person to go through that program.” It’s not just her rapid growth as a trumpeter and composer, he said.
“She’s a brilliant musician. She’s got perfect pitch, and she’s also a great pianist and good drummer, a great writer and arranger. Literally she is the entire package. In my combo last year was the pianist and the trumpet and played very difficult things on melodica.”
She’ll be focusing on trumpet for the upcoming gigs, and has been honing a program of original tunes and arrangements with the quartet, “a lot of songs I wrote for the High School All-Star Combo,” Tang said. “I love playing this music, compelling, dynamic melodies with open sections we can take wherever we want to go.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at [email protected].
SKYLAR TANG QUARTET
When & where: 7:30 p.m. Jan. 10 at the Sound Room, Oakland.; $25; www.soundroom.org; 8 p.m. Jan. 11 at SJZ Break Room, San José; $20; sanjosejazz.org; 6 and 7:45 p.m. Jan. 12 at Mr. Tipple’s, San Francisco; $15-$25; mrtipplessf.com; and 8:30 p.m. Jan. 17; Bird and Beckett Books & Records, San Francisco; $25; birdbeckett.com
