Riley Mulherkar, an exceptionally talented young trumpet player with a bevy of accolades and work with A-list collaborators under his belt, is stepping out on his own with a simmering, unexpected new artistic statement in his debut solo album Riley. 

Alongside producers Rafiq Bhatia, whose band Son Lux did the Oscar-nominated score for Everything Everywhere All At Once, and critically-acclaimed pianist Chris Pattishall, Mulherkar has spent the past five years refining this expansive, ambitious record which blends his bone-deep immersion in the jazz tradition with the openness and curiosity that's informed his diverse collaborations as a soloist and as a co-founder of celebrated brass ensemble The Westerlies.

"The overarching concept was to make a record that sounds like how jazz makes me feel," Mulherkar says. "But that doesn't always mean that it sounds like jazz."

The trumpeter has had audiences on their feet since he was in middle school, a prodigious and disciplined player soaking up everything he could from Seattle's unexpectedly rich and rooted jazz community. Playing under legendary band directors Robert Knatt and Clarence Acox prepared him for Juilliard, where he quickly found a musical home with Jazz at Lincoln Center and its leader, legendary trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. 

Since, he has played with everyone from Kenny Barron to Alan Cumming, becoming the first recipient of the Laurie Frink Career Grant at the Festival of New Trumpet Music in 2014 and receiving a Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists in 2020. Leading countless jazz ensembles as "the sort of musician who sees improvised music as a perfect delivery system for joy," as writer Nate Chinen put it, Mulherkar also stretched outside the genre alongside The Westerlies, performing and collaborating from Carnegie Hall to Coachella.

Riley, his opening recorded salvo as a soloist, was made possible by a grant from the SPACE on Ryder Farm in Putnam County, New York — an idyllic setting where Mulherkar went about writing many of the album's five original compositions. He had worked with Bhatia and Pattishall on their respective solo projects, making their collaboration on his album even more organic. 

"The three of us developed a mutual love for working on each other's projects," Mulherkar says. "They're two of the best listeners I've ever worked with — I think that's evident in how they play and how they produce, because a huge part of this music is the sound design."

That emphasis on production and sound design is probably the album's biggest departure from Mulherkar’s previous output, both with The Westerlies and as a soloist. But it is to an end that is, as he describes it, absolutely rooted in a reverence for the feeling of the music, rather than orthodoxy around style. Take his version of "King Porter Stomp," one of the oldest songs in the jazz canon — which, in Mulherkar and his collaborators' hands, moves from familiar, warm improvisation to pulsing, spacey electronic exploration in the space of four minutes. 

"The way that that song is realized is absolutely not acoustic, and absolutely not traditional," he says. "But it gives me the feeling I get when I listen to King Oliver or Jelly Roll Morton play that song." Mulherkar’s stunning, raw take on jazz chestnut "Stardust," by contrast, is set in a much more conventional arrangement — yet sounds totally timeless. "It never gets old, no matter how many times I hear it or play it," he says. "That song is always a vehicle to get in touch with the ancestors of this music."

The music on Riley bounces between those two polarities, with Mulherkar’s ebullient trumpet as the centerpiece and throughline (except on interludes "Looking Out" and “Looking Up,” original compositions that center Pattishall on piano). "Ride Or Die," one of Mulherkar’s pieces, finds the trumpeter at his most anthemic, playing clarion melodies that you can't get out of your head over pulsing, distorted bass. "Compositionally and sonically we constructed it like a pop song, but the language is jazz," as Mulherkar puts it.

His sound is rougher and more organic — intentionally so — on "Honey Man," his take on George Gershwin's "Here Comes de Honey Man" from Porgy and Bess. The performance is an homage both to Miles Davis and Gil Evans' Porgy and Bess — Mulherkar’s favorite album — and his late teacher Frank Kimbrough, who used to perform it. Fittingly, given that it's so personal to him, Riley and his collaborators strip the song down to its core and build it back in a surprising new way. "I was going for complete vulnerability — which is what I love the most about trumpet playing, but is often the thing trumpeters try to avoid," he says.

The album's only featured guest is another longtime collaborator, vocalist Vuyo Sotashe, on a traditional song that Alan Lomax recorded incarcerated men singing at Parchman Farm in 1948. "To me it's just as relevant in 2023 as a call to action for the abolition of policing and incarceration in this country," Mulherkar says. "You're dealing with the themes of this song if you're living in this country, whether you know it or not."

That blending of the past and the present to sobering — and on other songs, celebratory, or melancholy, or mysterious — effect grounds Riley, a personal statement that's nevertheless expansive in its reach. "This whole record is, hopefully, reflective of my relationship to the music," he says. "It's all history and it's also all right now."