Brian Courage

Biography
Articles

Originally from Long Island, NY, bassist Brian Courage has spent the last decade as an integral part of the creative music scenes in Minneapolis, Brooklyn, and now Chicago, where he currently resides. He has performed alongside an extensive array of nationally acclaimed improvisers, including Greg Ward, Jon Irabagon, Lew Tabackin, David Hazeltine, Jason Stein, Weasel Walter, Michael Lewis, Erik Fratzke, Russ Johnson, JT Bates, and Billy Mintz. Brian is adept at a wide range of styles and has performed with the Minnesota Orchestra, renowned vocal quartet The Four Freshmen, the Chicago Tap Theater, and the New York based Americana / blues rock band Hollis Brown, with whom he toured the US and Europe extensively. His most recent creative endeavor is Abhorrent Expanse, a fully improvised metal band. Their debut album "Gateways to Resplendence" has been featured in prominent outlets including Decibel, Metal Injection, Burning Ambulance, and Wire Magazine.

Paul Dietrich's Elemental Quartet: A Small Patch of Earth

Read "A Small Patch of Earth" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci

by Richard J Salvucci
February 25, 2025

Anyone who spends much time watching contemporary instrumentalists on the internet is bound to come away impressed. Modern players, it sometimes seems, can do just about anything. And that is particularly true of some instruments in the brass family, where the advances in technique and range over just a half-century are particularly impressive. There are many trumpet athletes, able to leap impossible intervals in a single bound and circular breathe their way smoothly through half a concerto and generally play ...

Album Review

Paul Dietrich: 5+4

by Jack Bowers
September 29, 2023

The concept for this latest album by Wisconsin-based trumpeter, composer and educator Paul Dietrich, his fourth as leader, can be found in its title, 5+4, wherein he employs a jazz quintet and four-member string section. It is to Dietrich's credit that neither one outshines the other; the quintet takes the lead on six of the album's eight numbers (all written by Dietrich), the strings on the others ("Out Here," “A Separation"). Indeed, the two components mesh so ...