William Warfield:  

College Bachelors of Music Ed. - Towson State University Bachelors of Music, Jazz/Commercial - Manhattan School of Music Masters of Music, Jazz/Commercial - Manhattan School of Music Workplace I am a professional trumpet player, composer and band leader living in New York City. I am also the director of jazz studies at Lehigh University. Recently I was given tenure and promoted to the rank of associate professor of music. My band is now listed on my space. I don't really know what else to put here. I left Towson State in 1975 and played for a year with a local band called the Admirals. After that I just kind of hung around Baltimore for awhile. I got a chance to play with Sonny Stitt downtown in 76 and 77. I joined a group called "Both Worlds" late 1978 and left that band to direct a group called "The Port City Jazz Ensemble" which was attached to the Mayor's office in Baltimore in 1979 and 80. I moved to NYC in the fall of 1980. My first experiences in NYC were great. I got a chance to perform with Mel Lewis' group at the Village Vanguard and made a couple of recordings with a group called the "Bill Kirchner Nonet". The first one was called "What it is to Be Frank" in 1981 and the second in 1983 was called "Infant Eyes". The recordings were quite successful and one of the arrangements that I did for the group, "On the Sunny Side of the Street" got extensive reviews and airplay and sort of put me on the map in a minor league sort of way. Bored yet, well there's more. During the time I was working with Kirchner I toured with Paul Anka in 1982. We went to Europe, all over the US and Canada and perhaps my favorite memory with him was working at Sun City, Botswana in South Africa. We were the first group to break the entertainers boycott of the place. It was wild. Between gigs with Kirchner and Anka I also free-lanced around NYC and performed with such crazies as Lester Bowie, Oliver Lake, Cecil Taylor, Sheila Jordan and Wynton Marsalis when he first moved to NYC. In 1984 I took a gig in Nausau in the Bahamas at Cable Beach Casino. I returned to NYC a little burnt in '85 and for comic relief took a job with Bear Stearns (that's right, Bear Stearns) on Wall St. just to see if I could actually work in a 9 to 5 job. I got my series 7 license and worked at the Bear long enough to save money to do my first album "New York City Jazz", the Bill Warfield Big Band on Seabreeze Records in '88 released in 1992. The album did really well around the world and sold a lot of copies for a jazz album. Now that I was a big deal I did what any aspiring artist would do. I took a teaching job at the Dalton School in ...Expand for more