Jonathan Armstrong is a musician, composer, and educator serving as the Director of Jazz Studies and Commercial Music at Idaho State University. He moved to Pocatello in 2015 after living and working as a professional musician in Los Angeles for nine years. Jonathan has established a creative and dynamic career as a band-leader, performer, contemporary composer, and innovative educator. He is also an Antigua Winds sponsored artist.
In Los Angeles he performed with musical luminaries Vinny Golia (avant-garde jazz musician), Bennie Maupin (saxophonist who performed and recorded with Miles Davis), Vincent Gallo (indie filmmaker and songwriter), and Mike Barone (arranger and composer for “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson). He co-founded the jazz quartet Slumgum and released three critically acclaimed albums. Jonathan has performed across the United States, in Japan, Austria, and Germany on saxophone, flute, clarinet, bass, guitar, piano, drums, and electronic sampler. He has also performed on countless recording sessions, concerts, and festivals.
As a composer, Jonathan is passionate about collaborating with artists from other disciplines, writing music for theater, dance, and film. He scored the theatrical productions Exhibit A, Homo Economicus, and Record of Light, the dance performance Space Opera with the Heidi Duckler Dance Company and worked on the animated film Tentacles of Dimension. He has been commissioned to compose pieces for five different premieres by L.A. chamber ensembles, and to write an original piece for the Idaho State University Chamber Choir which will be premiered on April 20th, 2018.
Jonathan has established a reputation as a daring bandleader with three album releases of his original work. His debut "Farewell" (released in 2013) is a five-song suite for the Jon Armstrong Jazz Orchestra, a 23-piece large ensemble. The album “Burnt Hibiscus” (released November 2016) is a project that combines contemporary poetry with traditional Hindustani music played by a ten-piece chamber jazz ensemble. The album has received widespread acclaim, most notably being listed as the #2 jazz release of 2016 by national jazz critic Dave Sumner of Bird is the Worm who writes:
“The melodies provoke a simple, crisp lyricism… a quality the ensemble exploits to launch into intricate rhythmic passages and harmonic excursions that stretch far out from the song’s opening moments. Massively creative at both conception and conclusion, and one of the very best albums to come out in 2016. Perhaps, the very best.”
In 2020, Armstrong has released a new album for sextet on Orenda Records, “Reabsorb”. Featuring an outstanding ensemble of LA musicians, Reabsorb explores human’s relationship with our own mortality. As Armstrong writes, the music is “a meditation on our own mortality, a journey from raging against the inevitable, to acceptance, towards transcendence, and the reabsorption of our spirit back into the universal consciousness of all life.”
Jonathan continues to cultivate his career as a performer and composer in the intermountain west. He joined the Grouptet, a jazz ensemble led by the world-renown drummer Kobie Watkins, with whom he has toured extensively and recorded and released the critically acclaimed album, Movement, on Origin Records in 2018. The Grouptet was also invited to perform with the Idaho State-Civic Orchestra for a collaborative concert in 2018, for which Jonathan wrote the bulk of the orchestral arrangements. In 2017 he was awarded a Quickprojects grant from the Idaho Commission on the Arts for his original composition, “Gathering Resonance”, which was premiered in late 2017. Jonathan was also recently awarded a 2019 Performing Arts Fellowship by the Idaho Commission on the Arts,
In addition to his work as a professional musician, Armstrong is an innovative educator who has established several creative music programs. He founded jazz programs at three Los Angeles based educational non-profit organizations: Heart of Los Angeles, Plaza De La Raza, and the Funk Orchestra program at Harmony Project. He implemented a high school jazz orchestral program through Los Angeles City College, ran the instrumental music program at a middle school, and taught for California Arts Partnership Summer Academy and the Oakwood School Academy of Creative Education. In every context, Jonathan encourages students to develop their own unique creative voice by stressing original composition and improvisational technique.
He has taken this same philosophy to Idaho State University, where he has established an innovative take on the commercial music degree. The culminating project for the degree is to produce and release an original album, which will be released on City Creek Records, a student-run record label based out of the ISU commercial music program. Students take courses in recording, mixing, song-writing, production, ensemble-leading, composition, improvisation, video editing, and business. He leads the ISU Big Band, manages the annual ISU Jazz Fest, and co-directs the ISU Video Game Music Ensemble. He also hosts a bi-monthly radio show on KISU called “Don’t Call it Jazz”
Armstrong constantly arranges music for his ISU ensembles, who play varied musical styles from around the world and regularly share the stage with world class creative musicians such as Sheela Bringi, Clinton Patterson, Evil Genius, Industrial Revelation, the Cathlene Pineda quartet, Vinny Golia, David Roitstein and Larry Koonse, Kobie Watkins, Dawn Clement, Johnaye Kendrick, Shane Endsley, Corey Christiansen, Art Lande, Howard Wiley & Extra Nappy, and Time for Three.
Between all these projects, he enjoys hiking in Pocatello and exploring the area with his wife, kids, and dog.