A Musical Maverick

For renowned Canadian trumpet player Ingrid Jensen, it was all in the family. Music filled her home as a child – classical and jazz primarily – and it seeped into her soul. When she picked up the trumpet in middle school, her course was set. After graduating from Berklee College of Music in Boston, she did what so many aspiring musicians do: she moved to New York and started performing in the subways. That didn’t last long.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Jensen has played with just about everyone and just about everywhere. The list includes such notables as Esperanza Spaulding, Maria Schneider, Christine Jensen, Dennis Leary, Peter Frampton and she performed on Saturday Night Live with Corrine Bailey Rae. Her instrumental talents have taken her to just about all of Europe and Scandinavia, Japan, Australia, South Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. For five years she held the Trumpet Chair at an Austrian music conservatory. Currently she is an artist-in-residence at the University of Michigan. She loves to teach and has given master classes and workshops around the world.

Jensen is a musical free spirit whose style has been described as Zen, intuitive, fluid and original. She bucks the long-held notion that the trumpet is an instrument that needs to be wrestled with, and instead subscribes to a more relaxed approach to playing. Calling herself “a swinger at heart,” perhaps Jensen sums her music up best when she says, “I will always play music that has the heart of Basie, the spirit of Louis and the effervescence of Clark Terry. That’s in my DNA. But at the same time, I will continue to play in odd meters and experiment with electronics. It’s part of what I hear now and it’s part of society. Whatever people think about it, I don’t care. I’m too busy having fun.”