Artists... --- Andrew Oliver Ben Darwish Trio Ben Macy Trio Chris Mosley David Ornette Cherry David Valdez / Pere Soto Drew Shoals Dusty York Farnell Newton / Marcus Reynolds Quintet Gordon Lee John Gross / Dave Frishberg / Charlie Doggett Mel Brown Sextet Paxselin Quartet Renato Caranto Tim Willcox   about store calendar video contact links

Andrew Oliver is a pianist and composer from Portland, Oregon. He also plays cello and trumpet. He grew up playing classical piano and cello, and eventually switched to jazz at the beginning of high school, when he began taking lessons from Randy Porter, his most influential teacher. He lived in New Orleans from 2002 until 2005, where he studied jazz at Loyola University and performed as both a bandleader and sideman. After evacuating from Hurricaine Katrina in the summer of 2005, he returned to Portland and resumed his studies at Portland State University, where graduated in June 2007 with a B.M. in Jazz Performance and a B.A. in French. He spent the fall of 2006 studing and playing music in Angers, France.

In addition to studying with Randy Porter since 1999, he has also studied with Matt Lemmler, Michael Pellera, and Darrell Grant. He was a member of the Portland Youth Jazz Orchestra in its pilot year (2002), and has performed with numerous musicians in New Orleans and Portland, including Glen Moore, Maurice Brown, Dick Titterington, Rob Scheps, Irvin Mayfield, Devin Phillips, and others. He has performed at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the Portland Jazz Festival, and at folk festivals in France, Italy, Poland, and Bulgaria as a member and director of the band for the New Orleans-based Komenka Ethnic Dance and Music Ensemble.

He is currently active in several groups: he leads a sextet playing his original compositions and arrangements as well as writing for and co-directing the Portland Composers' Orchestra, a big band promoting new music by Portland's jazz composers. He also is a member of Devin Phillips' group New Orleans Straight Ahead, which has recently released its first album, and with which he was recently selected to tour West Africa in the spring of 2008 as a cultural ambassador under the auspices of the State Department and Jazz at Lincoln Center. He also plays in and composes for Sound for the Organization of Society, a New Orleans-based large ensemble which released its first record in the spring of 2007, and he performs on trumpet with the Krebsic Orkestar, an 11-piece brass band playing Serbian gypsy music.