Home » Member Page

Chris Trinidad

About Me

Filipino-Canadian and San Francisco Bay Area-based musician, teacher, and scholar Chris Trinidad has fallen into the place where everything is music. Originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, his relationship with music grew through exploring various instruments beginning with the voice, then the piano, followed by the bass guitar, and finally the drum set with little detours in the world of percussion and forays with the guitar.

Chris's formal education includes undergraduate training in Jazz Studies and Secondary Education, graduate study in the fields of Philosophy and Sociology of Music Education and Theological and Liturgical Studies, and doctoral work in Educational and Interdisciplinary Leadership. All of these seemingly disparate disciplines help to inform the music that he makes.

His compositions are inspired by such writers as Ralph Towner, Pat Metheny, Jack DeJohnette, Jan Garbarek, Bill Evans, Brad Turner, Chris Gestrin, and Chris Tarry. He also draws ideas from genres as disparate as Cuban Timba, Original Pilipino Music, Gregorian Chant, and British Progressive Rock.

He has discerned that the core purpose of his music is to explore the intersections of his identity and upbringing, while combining these into musical conversations with his current experiences and curious interests. He divides his time between creating music, developing high school students into compassionate human beings, and working to defeat his addiction to improvising excessively in the saddest of all keys ... D minor!