Etienne Charles: Creole Christmas

The former SFJAZZ Collective trumpeter who meshes a profound knowledge of the jazz tradition with the bone-deep Creole influence of his Trinidad upbringing, Etienne Charles brings his tropical approach to holiday classics — the music documented on his joyous 2015 Culture Shock Music release Creole Christmas, along with new arrangements.

A visionary bandleader, composer and multi-instrumentalist, Charles has developed a strikingly original body of tunes combining traditional rhythms and themes from Trinidad and Haiti with a post-bop harmonic lexicon. Scion of an illustrious musical clan, Charles is the fourth generation of his family to advance Caribbean music. A professor of jazz studies at Michigan State University and 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he has staked his own claim as an innovator with a series of critically acclaimed albums, from his 2006 debut Culture Shock to 2019’s Carnival: The Sound of a People Vol. 1 — an epic project devoted to the Carnival tradition of Trinidad.