IAN CAREY is a San Francisco Bay Area–based jazz trumpeter, composer, and educator who “asks deep musical questions and comes up with compelling answers” (Bill Kirchner, editor, The Oxford Companion to Jazz).

His musical projects include the IAN CAREY QUINTET+1 (“a highly skilled band of improvisers” –DownBeat), which has been performing his original compositions for over a decade and has been featured on five albums including the 2020 release Fire in My Head; WOOD METAL PLASTIC, a 7-piece group which “combines the delicately calibrated dynamics of a chamber ensemble with alternating sections of close voicings and free improvisation” (Andrew Gilbert, Berkeleyside) and released its debut album Strange Arts in 2024; TAKOYAKI 4, a street-food–style organ/horns quartet which performs original music and jazz rarities; and DUOCRACY, a duo with pianist Ben Stolorow which explores rare American standards with intimacy and interplay.

Born in Binghamton, New York, and educated in Northern California and New York City (where he attended the New School and lived for seven years), Ian has lived and worked in the Bay Area since 2001, performing with local bandleaders including Don Alberts, Lorin Benedict, Sam Bevan, Bryan Bowman, Anthony Brown, Nathan Clevenger, Greg Johnson, Lewis Jordan, Mark Levine, James Mahone, Ron Marabuto, Fred Randolph, Anne Sajdera, Adam Shulman, and Suzanna Smith; and in ensembles including the Electric Squeezebox Orchestra, the Circus Bella All-Star Band, the Morchestra, the duo B. Experimental Band, the North Berkeley Jazz Quintet, the Lost Trio, and the Contemporary Jazz Orchestra; as well as appearing with visiting luminaries including John Daversa, Anton Schwartz, and Satoko Fujii. As a composer, Ian has received commissions from Chamber Music America and Intermusic SF, and was named as one of “12 Bay Area Composers You Should Know” by SFJAZZ in 2018. He was included in a list of “The Elite 150 of Early- and Mid-Career Jazz Masters” in Ted Gioia’s How to Listen to Jazz (2016), and was the subject of a 2021 profile in the International Trumpet Guild Journal titled “Ian Carey: Contrast Can Be Just as Effective as Synchronicity.”

Ian is an experienced music educator who runs his own private lesson studio. He is on the faculty of Sonoma State University, where he serves as jazz trumpet instructor and director of the Concert Jazz Ensemble, and has been a visiting instructor at Stanford University, California Jazz Conservatory, Santa Rosa Junior College, Oaktown Jazz Workshops, and the Stanford Jazz Workshop.

He is also an avid writer and blogger; his writing has been featured in DownBeat and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and his essay “How Not to Become a Bitter White Jazz Musician” was mentioned by trumpeter Nicholas Payton as “the most brilliant piece that I have ever read about the dynamic of a White person in Black American Music.”