Mark Armstrong (born 5 November 1972) is a British jazz trumpeter, musical director, composer, arranger, and educator.
Armstrong was born on 5 November 1972) [1] in Newcastle upon Tyne, northern England. [2] At the age of five he moved to Amersham [1] and attended Dr Challoner's Grammar School, [3] playing with the Aylesbury Music Centre Dance Band and Buckinghamshire County Youth Orchestra. [1]
He studied for a degree in music at the University of Oxford, when he played with the Oxford University Jazz Orchestra and helped to reform the Oxford University Big Band. [4] He subsequently took a postgraduate course in jazz and studio music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. [5] [ better source needed ] [4]
Armstrong is a jazz trumpeter, musical director, composer, arranger, and academic. He has also performed in a wide range of commercial settings, including the London Sinfonietta, with The Four Tops, and on film and TV soundtracks. He has composed and arranged many types of music, including chamber music, jazz, and symphony orchestra. [6]
From 2008, Armstrong was jazz professor at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London. [2] Since 2011 and as of 2017, he was the artistic and music director of the UK National Youth Jazz Orchestra (NYJO), and directed the RCM Swing Band and the RCM Big Band. [3]
As of March 2024 [update] he no longer appears on the NYJO website. [7]
As of March 2024 [update] Armstrong is the RCM Jazz Professor. He is also a member of the Ronnie Scott's Jazz Orchestra and Robin Jones's Latin Underground. [6]
Armstrong was nominated in the best trumpet category of the 2007 Ronnie Scott Jazz Awards, [2] and won the BBC Big Band Competition arranging prize.[ when? ][ citation needed ]
As of 2024 [update] , Armstrong lives in Blackheath, south-east London, with his wife, conductor Elinor Corp, and their three children. [2]
A big band or jazz orchestra is a type of musical ensemble of jazz music that usually consists of ten or more musicians with four sections: saxophones, trumpets, trombones, and a rhythm section. Big bands originated during the early 1910s and dominated jazz in the early 1940s when swing was most popular. The term "big band" is also used to describe a genre of music, although this was not the only style of music played by big bands.
The Royal College of Music (RCM) is a conservatoire established by royal charter in 1882, located in South Kensington, London, UK. It offers training from the undergraduate to the doctoral level in all aspects of Western Music including performance, composition, conducting, music theory and history, and has trained some of the most important figures in international music life. The RCM also conducts research in performance practice and performance science.
Sir Malcolm Henry Arnold was an English composer. His works feature music in many genres, including a cycle of nine symphonies, numerous concertos, concert works, chamber music, choral music and music for brass band and wind band. His style is tonal and rejoices in lively rhythms, brilliant orchestration, and an unabashed tunefulness. He wrote extensively for the theatre, with five ballets specially commissioned by the Royal Ballet, as well as two operas and a musical. He also produced scores for more than a hundred films, among these The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), for which he won an Oscar.
James Deuchar was a Scottish jazz trumpeter and big band arranger, born in Dundee, Scotland. He found fame as a performer and arranger in the 1950s and 1960s. Deuchar was taught trumpet by John Lynch, who learned bugle playing as a boy soldier in the First World War, and who later was Director of Brass Music for Dundee.
Gordon Percival Septimus Jacob CBE was an English composer and teacher. He was a professor at the Royal College of Music in London from 1924 until his retirement in 1966, and published four books and many articles about music. As a composer he was prolific: the list of his works totals more than 700, mostly compositions of his own, but a substantial minority of orchestrations and arrangements of other composers' works. Those whose music he orchestrated range from William Byrd to Edward Elgar to Noël Coward.
Joseph Horovitz was an Austrian-born British composer and conductor best known for his 1970 pop cantata Captain Noah and his Floating Zoo, which achieved widespread popularity in schools. Horovitz also composed music for television, including the theme music for the Thames Television series Rumpole of the Bailey, and was a prolific composer of ballet, orchestral, brass band, wind band and chamber music. He considered his fifth string quartet (1969) to be his best work.
George Edward Heath was a British musician and big band leader.
Sir George Dyson was an English musician and composer. After studying at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London, and army service in the First World War, he was a schoolmaster and college lecturer. In 1938 he became director of the RCM, the first of its alumni to do so. As director he instituted financial and organisational reforms and steered the college through the difficult days of the Second World War.
The National Youth Jazz Orchestra (NYJO), established as the London Schools' Jazz Orchestra in 1965, is a British jazz orchestra.
Gerard Presencer is an English jazz trumpeter.
Laurence Reginald Ward Johnson was an English composer and bandleader who wrote scores for dozens of film and television series, described as "one of the most highly regarded arrangers of big-band swing and pop music" in England. Much of Johnson's music was written for the KPM music library, for which he composed and conducted between 1960 and 1965.
William Michael Allingham Ashton OBE is a British band leader, saxophonist and composer. He is best known for co-founding NYJO - the British National Youth Jazz Orchestra, of which he was Musical Director from 1965 until his retirement in 2009 when he became Life President.
Harry Percy South was an English jazz pianist, composer, and arranger, who moved into work for film and television.
Mark Daryl Nightingale is an English jazz trombonist, composer, and arranger.
The Oxford University Jazz Orchestra (OUJO) is a jazz orchestra based in the University of Oxford, England. It was founded in 1991.
Ernie Hammes is a Luxembourger trumpet virtuoso, arranger, composer, and big band director who is prolific in both jazz and classical idioms. Notably in jazz, Hammes toured with Maynard Ferguson's Big Bop Nouveau band in 2005, alternating between the lead and jazz roles. Hammes has performed in more than twenty-five countries while simultaneously supporting the jazz scene in Luxembourg.
Simon Wallace is a British composer and pianist.
(Capt.) Ronald Edwin James Milne was a British-born singer and band director. He was also a composer and musical arranger who is known for his band arrangements and original compositions. He spent his formative years and the first years of his career in the United Kingdom, when he was widely known as Ronnie Milne. He subsequently auditioned to join the Canadian Army as a musician, was accepted in the rank of sergeant, and immigrated to Canada in 1953.
Ronald "Ron" Frank Paley is a Canadian composer, arranger, pianist, electric bassist, and big-band leader based in Winnipeg.
Gregory Bowen is a Welsh trumpet player. His primary work was done in London before relocating to Berlin, Germany in 1976. Since 1961, Bowen has performed and recorded with jazz, pop artists and entertainers from Europe and North America on records, soundtracks and T.V. broadcasts. Most notable is his lead trumpet work on the James Bond film soundtracks Goldfinger, Thunderball and You Only Live Twice.