Warren Wolf

Baltimore native Warren Wolf began studying vibraphone/marimba, piano, and drums at three years old, trained by his father, a teacher and vibraphonist, who wanted his son to be fluent in a variety of different musical styles. “Who I am, and who my father trained me to be,” Wolf told Baltimore Magazine in 2017, “is a complete musician.” By seven and eight, Wolf was touring with the Baltimore Symphony; he’d continue to appear with them regularly through his high school years at Baltimore School for the Arts. But when it came time to go to college, Wolf knew he wanted to shift gears and focus on jazz. At Boston’s Berklee College of Music, Wolf studied with Dave Samuels, a founding member of the Caribbean Jazz Project and longtime vibraphonist with fusionists Spyro Gyra. Samuels noticed Wolf’s technical chops right away but pushed him to find his own voice. “You’re pretty much just playing what Milt Jackson or Charlie Parker would play,” Wolf recalled Samuels telling him in a Feb. 2020 interview with Downbeat. “What do you have to say?” He’s spent the better part of the last two decades telling us, playing with the best of the best, from Bobby Watson, Christian McBride, and Tia Fuller to celebrated super groups like the SFJAZZ Collective. But he’s also forged his own path as a bandleader and recording artist, releasing eight albums as a leader, with the last four for major label Mack Avenue. In 2016, after two successful Mack Avenue releases, Wolf and the record label wanted to raise the bar. So, for Convergence, they went out and recruited the biggest names in the jazz world to guest: Brad Mehldau, John Scofield, Jeff “Tain” Watts, and Christian McBride. “It was time to show that Warren can hang with the best,” Wolf said later in that same Baltimore Magazine interview. Convergence also became the time for Wolf to show he’s more than just a straight-ahead jazz musician; that album includes not only a reimagined take on Stevie Wonder’s “Knocks Me Off My Feet,” but an ethereal solo vibes take on Chopin’s “Minute Waltz.” Wolf’s latest album, Reincarnation (2020), with help from one of the great contemporary fusion bassists in Richie Goods, strays more uniformly from the straight-ahead, inspired by the R&B and Motown he grew up listening to with his sisters and late mother. As a musician who can play everything from Shostakovich to seventies soul, Wolf still, above all, wants to play jazz; he just won’t be boxed in. As he told Downbeat in Feb. 2020, “To be honest, this record is still jazz. I just switched a couple things around. I’m upfront with the vibes, but the one thing you won’t hear is a pile of vibraphone solos. I was trying to go for more of a group sound and music that people can just turn on and say, ‘OK, this feels good.’” -Matt Silver

Photo Credit: Roy Cox Photography