New Artist of the Month: Trumpeter Skylar Tang

The past year or so has been pretty heady for trumpeter, composer, and budding bandleader Skylar Tang. In June 2025, the Bay Area native was featured on Words Fall Short, the latest album by her childhood idol, saxophonist Joshua Redman. This past summer, Tang provided a big band chart, commissioned by Carnegie Hall, for the Asia tour of NYO Jazz, where Tang had been a three-term member. In between, the Skylar Tang Quartet has played in venues across the country and international jazz festivals from Montreal to Moers, Germany. And in another six months, she’ll finally be able to get into the clubs legally on her own.

“I don’t necessarily publicize my age that much,” says Tang, now 20 and enrolled in a joint program with Columbia University and the Juilliard School. “Usually, it’s chill. New York doesn’t give me any problems, but on the West Coast they sometimes need to be a little sneaky about it.”

For Redman, who first met Tang during her days in the SFJAZZ High School All-Stars, age was barely measured in years. “She already had tremendous patience, a deep maturity and sensitivity,” he relates in Words Fall Short program notes. Having invited Tang to a soundcheck before a gig at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Redman sent her “on a whim” the sheet music for his metrically dense Icarus the night before. “She came in the next day with the whole thing memorized [and] played it perfectly,” he recalls. “[It] sounded like she understood the song better than I did!” He invited her to record it with him a few weeks later.

Tang’s musical initiation came by way of her Beijing-born father, an amateur classical pianist who discovered jazz after moving to the United States. He began guiding her at the keyboard by age 4. “He wasn’t the best teacher,” Tang says, laughing. “He had no book or curriculum. He just taught me songs he liked.”

He soon outsourced the classical lessons to a local piano teacher Tang now likens to her “third grandma,” but remained in charge of the CD collection. “One time when I was maybe 8, we were on a family road trip and kept searching for a song by Joshua Redman, either ‘Hide and Seek’ or ‘Birthday Song’ or ‘Faith’,” she recalls. “Those three songs were integral to my childhood, even before I started playing the trumpet.”

With Sean Jones for a live performance for BBC Radio 3's In Tune, in advance pf NYO Jazz’s 2023 debut at the Proms

When Tang first picked up the instrument at age 9, everything clicked. “I was immediately able to make a good sound,” she says, “and the youth orchestra was the first time I’d played music with other people.” If piano was a solitary pursuit, and the trumpet a social opportunity, then jazz soon offered a community through Bay Area education programs.

That all came to a halt during the pandemic, but Tang turned to composing and proved equally adept in getting her ideas on the page. In 2022, Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington Competition selected her original five-minute piece Kaleidoscope for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra to perform and record.

Later that year, with live performances fully resumed, she was selected for NYO Jazz, a national summer camp and touring ensemble under the auspices of Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute. Tang would return to the program for the next two summers—a feat matched by only one previous member (returning musicians need to reaudition for each lineup).

“From her first year, she had a vision for how she saw herself as a player, a bandleader and a composer,” says Joanna Massey, Carnegie’s Director of Learning and Engagement, who runs NYO Jazz and commissioned Tang to arrange Renee Rosnes’s song “Galapagos” for the 2026 tour. “She’s uniquely herself, in the way all great artists are."

Tang plays for a student drummer during an NYO Jazz workshop in Soweto 

After NYO Jazz’s tour to South Africa in 2024, Tang relocated to New York, where she found a larger base of collaborators. Two of her go-to players—now members of her quartet—were former NYO colleagues: pianist William Schwartzman (from 2023) and drummer Ethan Oliver (from 2024). Tang and Schwartzman later did a two-month residency at the USA Pavilion at the World Expo 2025 in Osaka.

“A lot of the music I write, and that we play as a quartet, started with these relationships,” Tang says. “You can compose alone, but the best—or at least the most touching—music is written for specific people,” she adds. “I always ask myself, ‘How would John [Murray] feel playing this on the bass? What would Ethan do with this on the drums? I tell them as little as possible, actually. I just say, ‘Let’s read this down’ and let their intuition speak first.”

So too was “the bandleading thing” greatly shaped by the singular NYO Jazz experience, she says: “You’re with the same group of people 24-7 for four weeks straight, which is intense, but also fulfilling, kind of like a family. I watched how Sean Jones led the band musically, how Joanna made sure everyone was where they needed to be.”

That balance of skills still motivates her professionally both on and off stage. “Leadership comes in the form of responsibility rather than hierarchy,” she says. “On stage, no one’s ‘in charge.’ For me, bandleading is taking care of communications, booking the flights—stuff managers would do if we had a manager right now. It’s about taking on those responsibilities so that William, John and Ethan can be free to do whatever they want when we’re together.”

_{Top photo by Iris Pope}

_{Bottom by Todd Rosenberg}