Taylor Ho Bynum is a performer on cornet and various brass instruments, composer, bandleader, and interdisciplinary collaborator with artists in dance, film, and theater. Critics have called him “a young brass master and compelling composer” (Jon Garelick, Boston Phoenix), “one of the most exciting figures in jazz’s new power generation” (Steve Dollar, Time Out Chicago), and “one of his generation’s top avant-garde figures” (Phillip Lutz, The New York Times). In City Arts, David Adler writes “Bynum is a quick-witted and virtuosic player, steeped in the flutters, growls and extended techniques associated with the late Bill Dixon, the tunefulness of Don Cherry and bluesy humor of Lester Bowie”; in the Guardian (UK) John Fordam describes his work as “splicing the slurs and bluesy elisions of the earliest jazz brass players into the spiky phrasing and rhythm-pattern conundrums of contemporary music.”

Bynum leads his Sextet and the chamber ensemble SpiderMonkey Strings, co-leads the little big band Positive Catastrophe with Abraham Gomez-Delgado, and works with many collective ensembles including a duo with Tomas Fujiwara, The Thirteenth Assembly, Book of Three, The Convergence Quartet, and Quartet Collective. Bynum’s ongoing association with Anthony Braxton is recognized as one of the most fruitful partnerships of that iconic composer’s long career, and his work with Bill Dixon produced some of the departed trumpet innovator’s late masterpieces. He has collaborated with other legendary figures including Cecil Taylor and Wadada Leo Smith, and regularly performs with forward thinking peers like Gerald Cleaver, Mary Halvorson, John Hebert, Jason Hwang, Myra Melford, Nicole Mitchell, Joe Morris, and Tyshawn Sorey. In addition, he is the vice president of Dave Douglas’s Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT Music), a founding partner of Firehouse 12 Records, and the president of Braxton’s Tri-Centric Foundation.

Bynum’s compositions have been documented on over a dozen critically-acclaimed recordings, including the 2011 album Apparent Distance, described by Nate Chinen in the New York Times as “all seductively challenging, full of standout moments that nevertheless dissolve into the whole.” His work has received support from Creative Capital, New Music USA, Chamber Music America, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the NEA, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and the French American Cultural Exchange, and he has toured as bandleader, composer, and performer throughout North and South America, Europe, and Asia.