Samantha Boshnack


Samantha Boshnack is a Seattle-based trumpeter, composer, and bandleader of contemporary jazz music.

Biography

Boshnack attended Bard College in New York, where she studied with Erica Lindsay, graduating in 2003. She subsequently moved to Seattle, Washington to play with the jazz ensemble Reptet, with whom she released four albums and toured. In 2011 she began two projects as bandleader: B'Shnorkestra and the Sam Boshnack Quintet. In 2014, she joined the composer collective Alchemy Sound Project, which includes Lindsay, pianist Sumi Tonooka, and others.
Boshnack's work has received support from many cultural institutions, including 4Culture, ASCAPlus, Artist Trust, Meet the Composer, Earshot Jazz, and Seattle Mayor's Office of Arts & Culture.

Critical Response

In its write-up of Boshnack after awarding her the Make Jazz Fellowship in 2018, arts organization 18th Street Arts Center said, "Boshnack synthesizes a dazzling array of musical influences." Other critical responses have similarly emphasized her wide stylistic reach, calling her "difficult to define," a composer existing outside of "rigidly defined categories." Her large-concept works often showcase this explorational impulse. Global Concertos features five soloists from five continents, while Sam Boshnack's Seismic Belt charts the route of the ring of fire, Earshot Jazz noting: "Boshnack skillfully weaves melodies... to express arcs, plate movements, and explosive volcanic activity."
Boshnack's "left of center modern jazz, with avant leanings" is also typified by her Nellie Bly Project, a 2017 concept record about the journalist Nellie Bly that features sung and spoken quotations from Bly's own writing. Avant Music News called the piece "an unusually compelling 35-minute suite that is strongly recommended."

Grants/Awards/Fellowships

Discography

With Reptet

Reptet, 2003Do This!, 2006Chicken or Beef?, 2008At the Cabin, 2011

With B'shnorkestra

Go to Orange, 2013
  • Global Concertos, 2016

With Sam Boshnack Quintet

  • Sam Boshnack Quintet, Exploding Syndrome, 2014
  • Sam Boshnack Quintet, Nellie Bly Project ''s'', 2017

With Alchemy Sound Project

  • Alchemy Sound Project, Further Explorations, 2016.
  • Alchemy Sound Project, Adventures in Time and Space, 2018.
  • Alchemy Sound Project, Afrika Love, 2021.

With Samantha Boshnack's Seismic Belt