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Chris Trinidad

Filipino-Canadian and San Francisco Bay Area-based musician, teacher, and scholar Chris Trinidad has fallen into the place where everything is music. Originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, his relationship with music grew through exploring various instruments beginning with the voice, then the piano, followed by the bass guitar, and finally the drum set with little detours in the world of percussion and forays with the guitar.

Chris's formal education includes undergraduate training in Jazz Studies and Secondary Education, graduate study in the fields of Philosophy and Sociology of Music Education and Theological and Liturgical Studies, and doctoral work in Educational and Interdisciplinary Leadership. All of these seemingly disparate disciplines and interests help to inform the music that he makes.

His compositions are inspired by such writers as Ralph Towner, Pat Metheny, Jack DeJohnette, Jan Garbarek, Bill Evans, Brad Turner, Chris Gestrin, and Chris Tarry. He also draws ideas from genres as disparate as Cuban Timba, Original Pilipino Music, Gregorian Chant, and British Progressive Rock.

He has discerned that the core purpose of his music is to explore the intersections of his identity and upbringing, while combining these into musical conversations with his current experiences and curious interests. He currently divides his time between creating music, developing high school students into compassionate human beings, and working on defeating his addiction to improvising excessively in the saddest of all keys ... D minor!

Gear

Mollerup Trinidad 6 String Orca Bass Guitar

Thomastik-Infeld Nickel Flatwound Roundcore

Novation Bass Station 2

GR Bass AT Cube Acoustic Amplifer


Tags

21
Album Review

Chris Trinidad: Chris Trinidad's Changing Tides

Read "Chris Trinidad's Changing Tides" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki


During the course of 2021's lockdowns and distancing, music educator and bassist Chris Trinidad began to wonder if technology was bringing people together or keeping people apart. During these reflections, he reengaged with music he had written years earlier, for a release he titled Certain Times (Iridium, 2014). “The compositions on that album were written in a span of seven days in the midwinter month of December 2013," Trinidad notes on Changing Tides. “During the liturgical season of Advent, the ...

19
Album Review

Chris Trinidad: Chris Trinidad's Changing Tides

Read "Chris Trinidad's Changing Tides" reviewed by Mark Sullivan


Bassist and composer Chris Trinidad released the quartet album Chris Trinidad's Certain Times (Iridium Records, 2015) five years after relocating from Vancouver to the San Francisco Bay area. The compositions were constructed from an assortment of sketches, built on grooves and simple harmonies to give the soloists freedom. For Chris Trinidad Y Con Todo (Iridium Records, 2019) he commissioned pianist Christian Tumalan of the Pacific Mambo Orchestra to arrange Latin jazz versions of songs from his Common Themes album series. ...

22
Album Review

Chris Trinidad: Chris Trinidad y Canción Tagalog

Read "Chris Trinidad y Canción Tagalog" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki


The quiet beauty of Chris Trinidad y Cancion Tagalog illustrates the subtleties between volume, power and intensity. The musician credits on its inner jacket list instruments with quite curious names, including three types of bata drums (okonkolo, itotele and iya) plus bombo and guagua among the percussion instruments, and with bandurria and octavina among the stringed and strummed ones. But the strangely quiet, beautiful music these instruments render sounds so much more meaningful than the strange ...

25
Album Review

Chris Trinidad: Chris Trinidad y Con Todo

Read "Chris Trinidad y Con Todo" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki


One might think that Chris Trinidad would have a hard time figuring out his next move after Chris Trinidad's Chant Triptych II (Iridium, 2018), an instrumental album based on traditional Gregorian chants but played on instruments from India, the Balkans and other cultures. But Trinidad eventually landed upon this recipe: Take one Filipino-Canadian bassist. Add songs he wrote on cruise ships in the Caribbean. Marinate for 19 years. Combine with one Mexican-American Grammy-winning arranger of salsa music.

21
Album Review

Chris Trinidad: Chris Trinidad y Con Todo

Read "Chris Trinidad y Con Todo" reviewed by Mark Sullivan


Filipino-Canadian bassist/composer Chris Trinidad has an eclectic discography. His previous album Chris Trinidad's Chant Triptych II (Iridium Records, 2018) presented arrangements of Gregorian chant, drawing on musical traditions from around the world. He has also recorded Latin music, as on Chris Trinidad's Certain Times (Iridium Records, 2015). But this album is Latin jazz all the way. Appropriately, Trinidad composed these songs while working on cruise ships in the Caribbean. Having played a lot of Latin music from the beginning of ...

25
Album Review

Chris Trinidad: Chris Trinidad's Chant Triptych II

Read "Chris Trinidad's Chant Triptych II" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki


Chris Trinidad seems unique even by musicians' standards: He keeps busy as a multi-instrumentalist, composer, choral conductor, and music educator in and around the San Francisco Bay area, but also has a background in liturgy, liturgical worship and educational leadership. Chant Triptych II is the second in a series through which he reimagines traditional Gregorian chant melodies in new contexts created by arrangements of instruments from radically different cultures. Trinidad's instrumental palette features his own electric bass guitar; ...

29
Album Review

Chris Trinidad: Chris Trinidad's Chant Triptych II

Read "Chris Trinidad's Chant Triptych II" reviewed by Mark Sullivan


Bassist/composer Chris Trinidad (based in the San Francisco Bay area) presents the second in a series of albums that place Gregorian chant melodies in new contexts. The arrangements combine instruments from a wide array of musical traditions: Indian tabla drums and bansuri flute; Caribbean bongo, congas and other percussion; accordion influenced by Argentinian tango and other folk traditions; Bulgarian tambura (which has double-coursed strings like a mandolin); and guitar, bass guitar and saxophone from Europe and North America.

Read more articles
Pat Metheny
guitar
Jaco Pastorius
bass, electric
Anthony Jackson
bass, electric
Steve Rodby
bass, acoustic

Photos

Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Chris Trinidad's...

Iridium Records
2021

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Chris Trinidad y...

Iridium Records
2020

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Chris Trinidad y Con...

Iridium Records
2019

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The Fast Crusade

Blind Knuckle
2019

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Chris Trinidad's...

Iridium Records
2018

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Chris Trinidad’s...

Iridium Records
2015

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