Jim Centorino

Trumpet player and composer Jim Centorino was born in Salem, MA, and found his first musical niche in drum and bugle corps, which he joined starting in high school. He went on to march with both the Boston Crusaders and Rhode Island Matadors corps, and was later inducted into the World Drum Corps Hall of Fame. Centorino was also a featured soloist and band president while attending Boston College, where he majored not in music, but geology. He went on to earn a master's in geophysics, and also studied composition and trumpet at the Boston Conservatory of Music. He often performed the national anthem at big-league sporting events in Boston, and did the same in Los Angeles after he relocated there. Centorino made his first recording in 1991 in tandem with pianist and fellow composer Carol Cole; best fitting the so-called contemporary instrumental description, Footsteps in the Sand became the best-selling album released by the small World Disc label. Centorino's first proper solo album was 1993's Ivory: A Celebration of Wildlife, a series of pieces meant to evoke images of different endangered species (some of the album's profits were donated to wildlife groups). In 1997, Centorino issued the seasonal album It's Christmas Everywhere. Two years later, after World Disc went bankrupt, Centorino acquired the rights to his back catalog and reissued the albums on his own Centorino Productions label. A new album, Portraits of America, followed in 2002, featuring another imagistic series of compositions evoking the American landscape. ~ Steve Huey