John Daversa

John is a distinguished trumpet-player, composer, arranger, producer, bandleader and educator. He is also a multiple Grammy Award winner and nominee and the recipient of many other awards and honors. In addition to his active career as a performer and recording artist he is currently Professor and Chair of Studio Music and Jazz at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Daversa grew up in a musical household, where he passionately sang and played various instruments from a very young age, eventually picking up the trumpet. Throughout his childhood the family moved several times, residing in Oklahoma, Las Vegas, and Sacramento, and ultimately returned to Los Angeles where he attended Hamilton Academy of Music for his final two years of high school. While still a student he began writing for large and small jazz ensembles and performed regularly with his quartet, Second Generation. It was during this time that he began playing the Electronic Valve Instrument (EVI). As a member of the Monterey All-Star High School Big Band for four years, John toured Japan and performed with iconic guest artists such as Dizzy Gillespie, J.J. Johnson, and Clark Terry. Upon graduating high school, he was recognized with both the Herb Alpert Award and the Italian Heritage Award and soon began pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree at UCLA in music composition and performance. Throughout the 1990’s, Daversa continued to be recognized as one of the jazz world’s most promising young performers and composers, winning the National Trumpet Competition, the International Trumpet Guild Jazz Soloist Competition, and the David Joel Miller Award for Composition and Performance, and placing as a semi-finalist in the Thelonious Monk Institute Jazz Trumpet Competition. During this time he founded and led various ensembles including the Junk Wagon Trio, The D.a.M. Band, which released an album in 1994, and the John Daversa Progressive Big Band, founded in 1996, which recorded Live at Catalina’s in 2000.

In 2019 and 2020 Daversa was musical director and producer for two important projects spearheaded by women: in 2019, Daversa was musical director and co-producer for the album Shoulder to Shoulder: Centennial Tribute to Women’s Suffrage, by the Karrin Allyson Sextet.  And in 2020, he musically directed, co-produced, and played on Regina Carter Freedom Band’s Swing States: Harmony in the Battleground. The same year, the John Daversa Quintet released Cuarentena: With Family at Home, an album of original and traditional Cuban boleros that paid homage to familial love and the healing power of music during the time of COVID, featuring musicians Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Carlo De Rosa, Dafnis Prieto, and Sammy Figueroa.

Daversa’s most recent project, All Without Words: Variations Inspired By Loren (release April 30, 2021) is a lush orchestral trumpet concerto played by the John Daversa Jazz Orchestra, composed by Daversa’s friend Justin Morell, and dedicated to Morell’s autistic son Loren. Celebrating the bond between a parent and child, the album is a paean to the trials, tribulations, successes and heart-warming moments of raising a non-verbal son.

Daversa is dedicated to creating meaningful, honest music with positive intention. Surely his work will continue to gain recognition and his brilliance as both musician and educator will continue to thrive and entertain, bringing benefit both to students and music lovers throughout the world.