Joshua Tazman

Love and fear, doubts and dreams, vividness and isolation — these opposites collide and blend in 17-year-old songwriter Joshua Tazman's music, a lushly textured, mysterious, and often surprising blend of jazz and pop that captures the unsureness and vulnerability of becoming an adult with the insightful sophistication of an old soul. Joshua is a vocalist, a pianist and a guitarist, and performs regularly around the Bay Area with his trio. He released his debut EP, Jump, produced by Mark Mazzetti for Record Company in a Box, on April 3 in conjunction with a sold out release party held at the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley.

Tazman recently won the 2016 DownBeat Student Awards for high school vocalist, and Jump was awarded a Bronze medal in the March round of the Global Music Awards. Recently, he won the high school vocal division of the national PDX Jazz Forward Competition and opened for the headlining artists at the festival, a group that included great saxophonists Pharaoh Sanders and Ravi Coltrane. He has performed with many other well-known jazz artists, including multi-platinum-selling, Grammy-nominated vocalist and interpreter Michael Feinstein, bassist, bandleader and educator Marcus Shelby, pianist/composer Jovino Santos Neto, saxophonists Dave Koz and Michael Zilber, and vocalist Sandy Cressman. His 2015 credits include the Grammy Camp Jazz Session Jazz Choir, and Finalist slots with the National YoungArts Foundation and Michael Feinstein’s Great American Songbook Competition. In 2014, Joshua took second place in Living Jazz’s Jazz Search West Competition, and in 2013, was named “Shape of Jazz to Come” by the Stanford Jazz Workshop. Before Joshua discovered jazz, he appeared in six operas with San Francisco Opera, including two principal performer roles. His first major gig was at age 11, when he sang at the historic inauguration of President Barack Obama with the San Francisco Boys Chorus, and he’s currently a featured performer at San Francisco’s Old Skool Café.