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Joe Fiedler

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Name: Joe Fiedler
City/Place: New York City
Country: United States

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What's Up? A great jazz musician who blends the sober and the spectacular working with music from one of the most important cultural launching pads this country has created. Jazz and Sesame Street? Yes. Open wide.
—Popmatters

An uncanny ability to blur the line between avant-garde and mainstream jazz.
—Downbeat

Fiedler pays indirect tribute to tradition while simultaneously turning the music inside out.
—Jazziz

Trombonist Joe Fiedler’s day job is as arranger, orchestrator and trombonist for Sesame Street. In the most complimentary manner possible, I’m In, the fourth CD by his own trio, is a bit like that kids’ TV show: it’s educational plus a whole lot of fun.
—New York City Jazz Record

Fiedler is equally facile playing inside and outside, but just as important, he likes and respects both. The trio’s fourth recording marks out a boundary where these elements can cordially coexist, and then throws a party inside that perimeter. ⭑⭑⭑⭑
—Downbeat

Fiedler uses superb technique, which includes playing chords (multiphonics), and a wit worthy of trombonist Ray Anderson to invigorate straight-ahead jazz, paying indirect tributes to tradition while simultaneously turning the music inside out.
—Jazziz

Fiedler’s among the most impressive trombonists to emerge in the past couple of decades.
—Signal to Noise

Trombonist Joe Fiedler has been an MVP in configurations that range from salsa bands to the jazz avant-garde.
—Time Out New York

You will be hard pressed to find more adventurous and imaginative use of the trombone as an instrument of musical expression.
—ITA

With only three instruments, these extremely talented musicians have made a thoroughly enjoyable album that will appeal to fans of mainstream, bluesy jazz.
—All Music Guide

Fiedler's latest, Sacred Chrome Orb, the leader seasons the mix with a remarkable array of timbral effects, including mind-bending multiphonics inspired by his idol, Albert Mangelsdorff.
—Time Out New York

With The Crab, the trombonist has made one of the small group jazz discs of the year.
—Village Voice

A deeply expressive and highly effective modern jazz album.
—All About Jazz

Pointing a way toward the future of the trombone.
—Cadence

Fiedler has created a memorable and brilliant tribute. Highly recommended.
—All Music Guide

Life

Bio: The New York Times has pinpointed a “feeling for a rugged but jaunty experimentalism” in the music of trombone veteran Joe Fiedler, a figure as esteemed in New York jazz circles as he is in the Afro-Caribbean and pop scenes. He’s an adventurous improviser and bandleader whose small-band outings include The Crab, Sacred Chome Orb, Joe Fiedler Plays the Music of Albert Mangelsdorff, I’m In and Like, Strange. His two releases by the unique low-brass unit Big Sackbut — a trombone/tuba corollary of sorts to the World Saxophone Quartet — have also cemented Fiedler’s reputation as a musical thinker with boundless imagination.

Owing to his long experience in pit bands, salsa groups and countless other professional settings, Fiedler had the opportunity to play trombone on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s show In the Heights (not long before Hamilton’s runaway success). Tony Award-winning orchestrator Bill Sherman was on the gig and took to Fiedler, bringing him on board the newly revived children’s show Electric Company. After three seasons, Sherman and Fiedler made the transition in 2009 to Sesame Street. From playing 350 gigs a year on the freelance circuit, Fiedler officially became a Sesame Street music director, working on what would become hundreds of song arrangements and thousands of underscoring cues (and still climbing). His latest small-group CD, Open Sesame, grapples with the legacy of the storied show of which he’s become an integral part. On it he reimages the timeless music of Joe Raposo, Jeffrey Moss and others on his own terms, with help from tasteful hell-raisers Jeff Lederer, Michael Sarin, Sean Conly and guest Steven Bernstein (of Sex Mob fame).

A Pittsburgh native and a New Yorker since 1993, Fiedler studied at Allegheny College and the University of Pittsburgh before launching into work as an in-demand sideman. He’s become one of the first-call trombonists in the world, featured on more than 100 recordings. He’s had extensive experience in the heart of the flowering big band scene, playing with Maria Schneider, Chico O’Farrill, the Mingus Big Band, Andrew Hill, Jason Lindner, Dafnis Prieto, Kenny Wheeler, Satoko Fujii, Miguel Zenón and many more. In smaller units he’s played with Lee Konitz, Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Myra Melford, Matt Darriau’s Ballin’ the Jack, David Weiss’s Endangered Species and a host of others. Fiedler also paid years of dues on the salsa and Latin circuit with Celia Cruz, Eddie Palmieri, Willie Colon, Ralph Irizarry and other major acts. His pop credits include Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony, Wyclef Jean, The Four Tops, Melba Moore and Leslie Gore, to name a few.

Without doubt this mass of musical experience filters into the trombonist’s mindset, the way he looks at craft, audience, band dynamics and perhaps most of all fun. Coming up in the ’80s, he recalls his favorite bands as the Jazz Passengers, Carla Bley, Ray Anderson — “bands and musicians that had this sense of humor, this sense of burlesque,” he says. Recalling the last great gasps of the downtown scene and his brushes with the early Knitting Factory bands, Fiedler knows that while many of those touchstones have disappeared, they live on still in today’s sensibilities and methods, for Fiedler as for many likeminded peers.

Downbeat and others have noted Fiedler’s effortless way of traversing charged free improvisation and music of more established tonal and formal parameters — “out” vs. “in,” as jazz musicians sometimes call it. He’s apt to draw out long and lustrous melodic tones while also manipulating his trombone sound with multiphonics and other extended techniques (playing one note and singing a higher note, sometimes producing an overtone to complete a chord). The deep sense of blues, tailgate and other earlier jazz approaches to the horn come through in Fiedler’s music, as do the sonic innovations of Mangelsdorff, or the mainstream hard-bop aesthetics represented by Slide Hampton, J.J. Johnson, Steve Turre and so many more. Melding it all into a signature voice, Fiedler harnesses the top talents of dear friends and associates in an endless quest to broaden his instrument’s reach. As veteran journalist Dan Ouellette has written, “It takes a true believer in [the trombone’s] potential for jazz esprit to courageously explore its range of conversation. That’s why Joe Fiedler is so impressive.”

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