Riley Mulherkar is a founding member of The Westerlies and in 2024 released his debut album Riley, hailed as “über hip, modern yet timeless…one of the best debut records to come out in a long, long time” (DownBeat).
The trumpeter has had audiences on their feet since he was in middle school, a prodigious and disciplined player soaking up everything he could from Seattle's unexpectedly rich and rooted jazz community. Playing under legendary band directors Robert Knatt and Clarence Acox prepared him for The Juilliard School, where he quickly found a musical home with Jazz at Lincoln Center and its leader, Wynton Marsalis.
Since, he has played with everyone from Kenny Barron and Dee Dee Bridgewater to Anna Deavere Smith and Alan Cumming, and in 2020 received Lincoln Center’s prestigious Emerging Artist Award in 2020 for his work as “an original bandleader, composer, arranger, educator, community activist and advocate for jazz and the arts.”
