Michael Leonhart

by David R. AdlerMichael Leonhart is a jazz trumpeter, a multi-instrumentalist, and singer/songwriter and an accomplished session musician. He has appeared on over 70 albums by a wide variety of pop, jazz, and hip-hop artists. Some of his performing and/or recording credits include A Tribe Called Quest, David Byrne, James Brown, and Lenny Kravitz. Leonhart also played trumpet and wrote horn arrangements for Steely Dan's 2000 comeback album, Two Against Nature. He then joined the band on tours of Japan and Europe. These achievements are all the more considerable given that Leonhart was only 26 at the time of this writing. But his earliest major achievement occurred at 17, when he won the Grammy for Best High School Musician in the U.S. Leonhart's debut as a leader, Aardvark Poses, was issued by Sunnyside in 1995. The follow-up, Glub-Glub, Vol. 11, appeared in 1997. In addition, Leonhart appeared alongside Brad Mehldau, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Mark Turner, and other emerging jazz greats on Perico Sambeat's 1998 album, Ademuz.