Riley Mulherkar celebrates his debut album at the KNKX studios

A founding member of the acclaimed brass quartet The Westerlies , trumpeter Riley Mulherkar has spent the last five years preparing his debut as a leader. On the day of his album release, he celebrated with a performance in the KNKX studios.

Mulherkar is a known quantity in music, especially to his family and friends in his native Seattle and his current community in Brooklyn. He’s sure to gain more attention with this impressive collection of standards and originals in Mulherkar’s unique style.

The new album Riley has origins going back five years. It shows off Mulherkar’s incredible facility on the trumpet playing century-old standards and his bright new compositions in a modern context with detailed digital production.

Mulherkar explained that the repertoire for Riley was settled at the beginning of the process, but he allowed himself the time to let each song take its own path.

Riley was a committed collaboration between Mulherkar and his producers, Rafiq Bhatia and Chris Pattishall . These two worked closely with the trumpeter from beginning to end.

Pattishall himself joined Mulherkar in KNKX's Studio X with bassist Russell Hall and Seattle-based drummer Chris Icasiano to play three songs from the album. Mulherkar added that this performance was his first attempt to perform the songs live with electronics.

“I’m really excited with how it’s sounding,” Mulherkar said with a smile.

“Consider everything an experiment," he said, quoting musician John Cage's Rules for Students and Teachers .

"We’re just experimenting and seeing what we can find, and I’m sure that years down the road it could be totally different and that’s great too,” Mulherkar added.

Listen to his back-beat-focused version of the early jazz classic “King Porter Stomp,” the modern fusion of original tune “Ride or Die” and the sweet duet with Pattishall on “Stardust.” We know you’ll join us in finding Riley Mulherkar’s studio session experiment to be a great success.

Musicians:

• Riley Mulherkar - trumpet
• Chris Pattishall - keyboards
• Russell Hall - bass
• Chris Icasiano - drums

Songs:

1. King Porter Stomp (Jelly Roll Morton)
2. Ride or Die (Riley Mulherkar)
3. Stardust (Hoagy Carmichael)