Brad Muirhead
Individual
Roles
Artist, Educator, MusicianBiography
Brad Muirhead (bass-trombone, tuba / sousaphone, euphonium) is well known to audiences across Canada and Europe for his powerful sound and inventive improvising and has been contributing full-time to the Vancouver music scene since 1980, working in all musical genres and styles, in settings from symphonic section playing to unaccompanied trombone. He has established himself as one of the uncommon bass-trombonists to work as a jazz improvisor and as a sought-after traditional / standard / modern / funk fusion jazz tuba-bass player. He has recorded and toured with his own groups Koan, Primal Orbit and BRASS ROOTS as well as Vancouver's three most important large jazz ensembles: the NOW Orchestra (now Orkestra Futura), Hugh Fraser & VEJI, and the Hard Rubber Orchestra. He has been extensively involved with Vancouver's jazz / new-music community as a performer and composer with numerous small and large ensembles, both as a leader and sideman.Brad is an active freelance musician, composer / arranger, recording artist, interdisciplinary collaboration artist / project instigator, music educator, arts administrator, community music facilitator, and music copyist. His career has been widely varied in content and direction with lots of overlap / crossover between all the different areas of work, which has kept things interesting—there has always been something going on, getting up and running, being planned and being dreamed-up, from new creative ensembles to new works for existing groups, interdisciplinary projects and new artistic practices. In recent years he has also (casually) stepped beyond artistic creation into the world of documentation—recording, mixing and mastering audio, and most recently video editing / production, which he finds quite interesting and seems to have a knack for.
Brad Muirhead, 2024