Trumpet

A native of Pittsburgh, Andy Kozar is a New York City and Boston based trumpeter, improviser, composer and educator that has been called a ‘star soloist’ by TimeOutNY and noted for his ‘precise trumpeting’ by New York Classical Review.

An advocate of contemporary music, he is a founding member of the contemporary music quartet loadbang which has been called ‘inventive’ by the New York Times and ‘cultivated’ by The New Yorker. He is also a member the Byrne:Kozar Duo and has performed with contemporary, classical, and pop music ensembles including Bang on a Can, Sigur Ros, Ensemble Signal, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, St. Petersburg Ballet, and the Wordless Music Orchestra.

He has worked closely with composers including Helmut Lachenmann, Christian Wolff, Joe Hisaishi (Spirited Away), George Lewis, Chaya Czernowin, and Pulitzer Prize winning composers David Lang and Charles Wuorinen. In 2020, Andy released ‘A Few Kites’ on New Focus Recordings, an album of music for trumpet and electronics that was called ‘entrancing’ by Alex Ross (The New Yorker, The Rest is Noise) and that ‘Trumpeters around the world owe Kozar…a debt of gratitude…the variety here is simply astonishing’ by an earful.

Andy is on faculty at the Longy School of Music of Bard College in Boston where, in addition to teaching trumpet, he is the Chair of the Instrumental Studies Department, director of Orchestra FLEX, co-directs Ensemble Uncaged, Longy’s contemporary music ensemble, and is a co-director of the Divergent Studio, a summer program designed for young composers and performers of contemporary music. Andy is a Yamaha Performing Artist and exclusively performs on Yamaha trumpets.