Ron Miles

A highly regarded trumpeter and educator, Ron Miles was a progressive artist with a warm signature tone and a bent toward harmonically nuanced, genre-bending jazz. Based in Colorado, where he headed the jazz studies program at Metropolitan State University of Denver, he garnered critical attention for albums like 1997's Woman's Day, featuring guitarist and lifelong collaborator Bill Frisell. There were also projects with luminaries like Fred Hess, Brian Blade, and Myra Melford. Beginning with 2006's Stone/Blossom, Miles embraced a compositional style informed as much by jazz as folk and Americana. He continued to release boundary-pushing albums like 2012's Quiver, combining modal music and hip-hop rhythms with the polyphony of New Orleans jazz. A deep spirituality and passion for civil rights also drove his work, as on 2017's I Am a Man and 2020's poetic Rainbow Sign. Prior to his tragically early death in 2022, Miles had garnered global acclaim.