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Imer Santiago
Trumpeter, composer, & educator who is an Ohio native with Puerto-Rican roots and loves to see people of various backgrounds, ethnicities, etc. unite under the banner of music!
About Me
Nashville is not widely known as a jazz town, although jazz has long been part of the
country music capital’s cultural fabric. Many musicians who earn their livings doing country
recording sessions by day have played jazz for pleasure by night. The history of jazz in
Nashville has been largely hidden, but with the release of trumpeter Imer Santiago’s debut
CD, Hidden Journey on saxophonist Rahsaan Barber’s Jazz Music City label, the vibrancy of
the Tennessee city’s current jazz scene comes into shining focus.
Santiago was surprised by what he found when he moved to Nashville from Austin, Texas,
in 2007 to begin teaching music at Moses McKissack Middle School. “I was impressed with
the kindness of the people in the city,” he says. “Music and the arts in general are well
represented here. I thought that I would only find Country and Christian music, but there
are tons of jazz cats here. If you want rap, it’s here. If you want Latin, it’s here. They’re
strong scenes, and they’re growing.”
Hidden Journey is the third full-length CD to be released by Jazz Music City. It follows
Barber’s critically acclaimed Everyday Magic (2011) and pianist Bruce Dudley’s The Solo
Sessions (2012). Barber produced Hidden Journey, and both he and Dudley, among the
most creative and in-demand young jazz musicians in Nashville, are prominent on
Santiago’s CD. Bassist Jon Estes and drummer Josh Hunt play on all but two of the disc’s 11
tracks. Percussionist Giovanni Rodriguez, who co-leads the Latin-jazz fusion band El
Movimiento with Santiago and Barber, contributes his congas and timbales to two. El
Movimiento guitarist James DaSilva plays on two others, and Imer’s younger brother Ivan
Santiago lends his electric bass to another. Nashville jazz veteran Rod McGaha joins
Santiago on a second trumpet for “Fourthcoming,” a modal Santiago composition that
alternates between 6/4 and 5/4 time. Stephanie Adlington, a Jazz Music City artist who has
recorded a jazz treatment of “Tennessee Waltz” as a single for the label, is featured vocally
on Santiago and Barber’s laid-back arrangement of the Ray Noble standard, “The Very
Thought of You.”
Santiago has known Barber for the past five and a half years. “He’s not only a great
musician but a kindhearted, loving person,” the trumpeter says. “I consider him one of my
best friends and truly a brother. You may not associate Nashville with jazz or Latin jazz,
but Rahsaan has an open mind to what the future can be. And he’s an entrepreneur. All
those things led me to ask him to produce this record.”
Bassist Estes contributed to the making of Hidden Journey in three different ways. “I hired
him specifically to play bass,” Santiago says, “but it ended up that he also mixed and
mastered the record and was the photographer for the picture on the CD cover.”
Of drummer Hunt, who has been touring with bluegrass great Alison Krauss, Santiago says,
“In the two or three years he’s been in Nashville, he’s been picking up gigs left and right
with a lot of different artists. He looks like a country guy, but he gets behind the set and
swings like crazy.”
Hidden Journey opens with “Girls’ Night Out,” a hard-shuffling Art Blakey–inspired 12-bar
blues with an eight-bar bridge on which Santiago’s gutsy solo suggests his fondness for
former Blakey trumpeters Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard. Santiago originally wrote the
tune as a blues, and Barber later added the bridge.
The Santiago composition “Flat 2176,” named for the street address of Ivan Santiago’s
house where Imer lived when he first came to Nashville, is heard in two different versions.
The first, “Flat 2176 (Para Puente),” sports a four-man horn section, is dedicated to Tito
Puente, and is given a Latin-jazz treatment that’s not unlike the music Santiago plays in El
Movimiento. The second, “Flat 2176 (For Miles),” is rendered without piano at a fast
straight-ahead clip and was recorded at the end of the session in one take. Santiago
utilizes a Harmon mute, much as Miles Davis often did.
The modal Santiago-Barber song “Hidden Journey,” which employs a partido alto groove
akin to that of Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage,” is named for a trip Santiago and his
future wife Laisa took to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 2010. “She thought we were going to buy
a trumpet,” he recalls. After purchasing the horn, he surprised her by asking her “to spend
the rest of her days with me” and placed an engagement ring on her finger.
Their son, Keegan Imer Santiago, was born in December 2011 and can be heard laughing
at seven months of age during the brief “Keegan’s Prelude,” which is followed three tracks
later by the longer “Keegan’s Lullaby.” “Keegan is not the most Puerto Rican or Hispanic
name you’re going to hear,” his father says. “I was trying to go for an Irish or Celtic melody
in a very loose way. It’s a pretty melody, and it reflects some of the joy of having a child.”
Santiago plays “What a Wonderful World” as a lyrical homage to Louis Armstrong, taking
the tune in waltz time instead of the usual 4/4. Armstrong had been one of Santiago’s
earliest favorites. While he was working on his master’s degree at the University of New
Orleans, Santiago’s admiration grew even deeper when he discovered the profound respect
New Orleans trumpet players had for the late jazz giant.
Two other Santiago compositions, the pensive “Lonely Nights” and the cha-cha-fueled
“Reminiscence,” round out the program on Hidden Journey.
Edwin Imer Santiago was born on October 26, 1976, in Lorain, Ohio, to parents originally
from Puerto Rico. He spoke only Spanish prior to kindergarten. English has been his
primary tongue ever since, although he also speaks Spanish, French, and Portuguese. He
took up trumpet while in the fifth grade, initially inspired by a trumpeter he remembers
only as “Junior” who played at a mostly Hispanic local Assembly of God church. Santiago
grew up listening to church hymns and to African-American gospel songs that had been
translated into Spanish. Remaining active in church music, he toured from 2004 to 2007 as
a member of the prominent Austin-based Christian rock band Salvador, with whom he still
plays occasional dates. He currently serves as the worship coordinator at The Church At
Antioch, an ethnically diverse congregation in the Antioch district of Nashville.
After high school, where he played in the orchestra, marching band, and jazz band and
discovered the music of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, Santiago spent five years at The
Ohio State University, where trumpet-playing professor Pharez Whitted was a huge
influence on his musical development. After earning bachelor’s degrees in jazz studies and
atmospheric sciences from Ohio State, Santiago attended the University of New Orleans,
from which he received a master’s of music degree in jazz studies in 2000. Among his
instructors in New Orleans were Ellis Marsalis, Wendell Brunious, Harold Battiste, and Clyde
Kerr Jr.
Initially drawn to Nashville because Salvador’s management and record label were located
there, Santiago began teaching middle school in 2007 and in August 2012 also began
working part-time as an adjunct trumpet instructor at Tennessee State University. His
middle school job having just ended, he will begin working in the fall of 2013 as the
director of the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools’ ambitious new district-wide mariachi
music program for students in grades 6 through 12.
Besides playing with and co-leading El Movimiento, which grew out of a weekly jam session
that he, Barber, and Rodriguez launched in 2008, Santiago does sessions in Nashville
studios on an average of twice a month. One of his most interesting studio dates was a
recent collaboration with musicians in Mumbai, India, on a dance tune titled “Battameez
Dil.” Santiago recorded his trumpet, along with a horn section in Nashville, while the
producers in India communicated with them over Skype. “They could see and hear us,” he
says of the Mumbai musicians. A lively Bollywood-style video of the song can be viewed on
YouTube.
With the release of Hidden Journey, Imer Santiago steps out of the shadows as a trumpet
stylist and composer to be reckoned with in the jazz world at large, and provides
additional evidence of the exciting new jazz movement that’s emerging in the country
music capital.
“I see myself long-term here in Nashville, as do Rahsaan and Giovanni,” Santiago says.
“Could we go to New York and make it? I think we could, but I feel that Nashville has a lot
to offer, and we’d like to see jazz and other music really associated with the city’s name in
the next 20 years. We really feel like there’s great talent here.”
