2024 Artist Exchange

Artist Exchanges give audience members a chance to gain insight into the lives and minds of a pianoSonoma Artist in Residence and to give each of their performances more personal context. This year’s Artist Exchange will be led by jazz trumpeter Riley Mulherkar
Artist Exchanges will take place in Schroeder Hall and are included as part of that evening’s concert ticket.

Photo credit: Zenith Richards

Thursday, July 18 at 4:30pm | Artist Exchange with Riley Mulherkar, jazz trumpeter

Riley Mulherkar has been recognized as a “smart young trumpet player” by The New York Times, praised by The Wall Street Journal as a “youngster to keep an eye on,” and is a 2020 recipient of Lincoln Center’s Emerging Artist Award for his work as “an original bandleader, composer, arranger, educator, community activist and advocate for jazz and the arts.”

Riley works with a number of leading artists of our time, including Wynton Marsalis, Anna Deavere Smith, and Alan Cumming, and is a founding member of The Westerlies, a new music brass quartet that creates the rarest of hybrids: music that is both “folk-like and composerly, lovely and intellectually rigorous” (NPR Music). Riley also serves as Artistic Director at Joye in Aiken, bringing leading young talent to the historic city of Aiken, South Carolina.

Born and raised in Seattle, Riley moved to New York in 2010 to study at The Juilliard School, where he completed his Bachelor’s Degree in 2014 and his Master’s in 2015. Riley is actively engaged in educational initiatives, founding the Joye in Aiken Jazz Camp in 2021, directing the Summer Advanced Institute at Seattle JazzEd from 2017-2019, and serving as an ambassador for Jazz at Lincoln Center’s “Jazz for Young People” program in New York and St. Louis from 2016 – 2018. Riley is also a faculty member of The College of Performing Arts at The New School in New York, NY. Riley is an Edwards Artist and performs on Edwards trumpets.