Home » Member Page

Jamie Breiwick

Spirits demonstrates extraordinary range and vision from this new jazz generation, and delivers on promise as if tapped into a musical wellspring flowing through their veins.

About Me

A life-long native of South-Eastern Wisconsin, Jamie is an active trumpet player, educator, and composer. He has shared the stage with many internationally-acclaimed musicians including: Arturo O’ Farrill, Dan Nimmer, Joe Sanders, Matt Ulery, Francios Moutin, Pete Zimmer, Rob Wilkerson, Rick Germanson, Matt Ulery, John Fedchock, Jon Faddis, David Bixler, and Dan Kinzelman. Jamie has performed with Grammy nominated R & B artist Eric Benet, and was featured live in performance for the taping of his recent music videos, “The Hunger” & “You’re the Only One”. He has also performed with the Barcelona-based band Brazzaville led by David Brown (Beck), and comedian Bob Newhart. In 2005, Jamie was the featured artist on the nationally-syndicated NPR show “Says You!”. Jamie’s current projects include Choir Fight, the Jamie Breiwick Quartet (with Tony Barba, Tim Ipsen, and Andrew Green), the Breiwick/Davis Duo, and the Lesser Lakes.

In 2003, Jamie recorded his first album as a leader “Song to a Rose”, featuring then 19- year-old bass phenom Joe Sanders. The recording featured several original compositions, as well as Freddie Hubbard’s classic “Gittin’ Down”, Sam Rivers’ “Beatrice, and the beautiful Jule Styne ballad, “I Fall in Love Too Easily”. Finally released in 2006, the recording was chosen by jazzreview.com’s Paul J. Youngman as a top-ten release of 2007.

The debut recording Song to a Rose by trumpeter Jamie Breiwick is included in my top ten favorites of this past year. Song to a Rose is a contemporary jazz approach to the bop idiom that flows serenely through seven tracks of musical intensity. A mix of standards “I Fall In Love Too Easily” with some great jazz tunes, “Beatrice” by Sam Rivers and “Gittin’ Down” by Freddie Hubbard, as well as four originals that showcase Breiwick’s first rate composing skills.

- Paul J. Youngman | jazzreview.com

In late 2011, Jamie recorded his follow-up effort, “Serenity”, a duo recording with the Boston-native pianist Barry Velleman. The 13-track release was recorded in one three-hour session, one take of each tune, no over-dubs, no do-overs. Serenity was released on January 1st, 2012 as a digital-download through the website “Bandcamp”.

Particularly on older standards like Henry Mancini’s “The Days of Wine and Roses” and Irving Berlin’s “How Deep Is the Ocean,” Breiwick and Velleman read each other like old fragments of poetry, of good times remembered. A safe guess is Velleman has outgrown the music through decades of experience, and finds himself flirting once again with the lyrics in order to de-sentimentalize the original; Breiwick, on the other hand, sounds more concerned with absolving the tradition of those words, of taking them into new and uncharted musical spaces.

- Graham Marlowe | Milwaukee Shepherd Express

As an educator, Jamie has been the Director of Bands at Maple Dale School in Fox Point, WI since 2002. In addition to being a full-time band director, he is on the faculty at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, Cardinal Stritch University, and has recently been added as an adjunct instructor of Jazz Trumpet at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. In 2010 he became one of the co-founders of the Milwaukee Jazz Vision, an organization guided by the purpose of advancing jazz and creative music in the greater Milwaukee area.

My Jazz Story

husband, daddy, music