Trombone
Robin Eubanks is the premier jazz trombonist of his generation. Whether leading his own groups, Mental Images and EB3, or performing with the SF Jazz Collective and the Dave Holland Quintet and Big Band, Eubanks is an artist whose impact on audiences has proven both powerful and lasting.
He was born into a remarkably musical family. His brother Kevin Eubanks served as musical director for The Tonight Show; their mother is a music educator; brother Duane is a renowned trumpet player; and their uncle, Ray Bryant, was a prominent jazz pianist in his own right.
Eubanks began his musical education at age eight and continued through college, graduating cum laude from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where he studied not only trombone but music theory, harmony, composition and arranging. He moved to New York City after graduation and launched a career that has yielded an extraordinary range of collaborations — Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Eddie Palmieri, Sun Ra, Barbra Streisand, the Rolling Stones and Talking Heads among them. He has won Grammys for his performances on Michael Brecker's Wide Angles and Dave Holland's What Goes Around and Overtime.
His teaching career is equally substantial. Eubanks spent 20 years at Oberlin College Conservatory as a tenured Professor of Jazz Trombone and Jazz Composition, and has also taught at Berklee College of Music, New England Conservatory, and the Prince Claus Conservatoire in the Netherlands. He is a sought-after lecturer and Yamaha clinician, conducting master classes at leading institutions across the United States and abroad.
In 2014 he won the JazzTimes Critics Poll for Best Trombonist, and he is a multiple winner of DownBeat's Readers and Critics Polls for Trombonist of the Year. He has received compositional grants from Chamber Music America and ASCAP.
As a composer, Eubanks is musically fluent and stylistically multilingual, moving among a wide variety of musical languages. The key appears to be a combination of complete command of his craft and an innate gift that can sound like equal parts math and magic. As he describes it:
"My compositions can morph fluidly from Swing to Funk to Latin to 11/8 or 7/4, without sounding forced or awkward. This allows me to draw upon all of my experiences. I have the freedom to create forms that unite diverse influences into new structures that are organic."
His compositions and arrangements have been recorded by the Mingus Big Band, the SF Jazz Collective, and the Dave Holland Quintet and Big Band, and are performed by college and university ensembles throughout the United States. He has recorded nine albums as a leader and contributed to hundreds more as a sideman.