Jim Snidero Quartet – The Essence of Contemporary Hard Bop
Jim Snidero alto sax · Olivier Truchot piano · Ignasi González Tejada double bass · Valentín Jam drums
Grammy Award-winning alto saxophonist, composer and author Jim Snidero embodies the uniqueness and appeal of jazz. Acclaimed as an alto sax virtuoso (DownBeat), with an astonishing improvisational ability (The Guardian) and a rich, pure alto sax sound (Stereophile), he has amassed more than 16 million streams on Spotify and Apple Music, delivering acoustic jazz of the highest quality, including his 2021 album Live at the Deer Head Inn (Savant), which received a five-star review in DownBeat magazine. In 2024, Jim Snidero reached the top of the jazz world, ranking among the five best alto saxophonists in DownBeat magazine’s prestigious international critics’ poll.
Raised in Camp Springs, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., Snidero fell in love with jazz during his teenage years, studying with jazz greats Phil Woods and David Liebman, and later attending the University of North Texas, where he joined the renowned One O’Clock Lab Band. After arriving in New York in 1981 at the age of 23, Snidero made his mark on the jazz world by joining Brother Jack McDuff’s band, recording two albums with the jazz legend. This marked the beginning of numerous notable collaborations as a sideman, including The Mingus Big Band, Eddie Palmieri, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Frank Wess, Sting, Frank Sinatra and Brian Lynch (winning a Grammy as a guest soloist), among many others.
Snidero established himself as a recording leader with On Time (Toshiba/EMI, 1984), the first of 25 acclaimed albums he would record under his own name. One of his early milestones was Blue Afternoon (Criss Cross, 1989), considered one of the greatest jazz albums of all time in The Penguin Jazz Guide: The History Of The Music In The 1001 Best Albums. His album Strings (Milestone, 2003/Savant, 2022), which he composed and arranged for a string ensemble and which the San Francisco Guardian described as a “masterpiece”, is also considered one of the finest recordings in the genre.
For the past 15 years, Snidero has been part of the prestigious Highnote/Savant label, earning him a place for several years among the leading international critics featured in DownBeat magazine’s critics’ poll. Highlights from his Savant catalogue include the acclaimed album Far Far Away with Kurt Rosenwinkel, Project K with Dave Douglas, and the aforementioned Live at the Deer Head Inn.
In 1996, Jim Snidero revolutionized jazz education by writing the first of three books in the Jazz Conception series (Advance), establishing himself as the best-selling jazz author of his generation. He later continued his work with The Essence of the Blues (2018) and The Essence of Bebop (2020), considered a masterpiece of jazz education. He is a professor at The New School and has been a visiting professor at Indiana University and Princeton University.
