Chris Speed

About

Chris Speed plays tenor saxophone and clarinet with a restless curiosity that keeps pulling him toward the edges of jazz. Based in New York, he has spent decades building an unusually wide network of collaborations, from the avant garde intensity of Tim Berne's Bloodcount to the Balkan and Middle Eastern grooves of Pachora, a quartet he co leads that draws on Greek, Bulgarian and Turkish music as much as original compositions. He founded Skirl Records in 2006 to give Brooklyn's creative music scene a dedicated home, and in 2021 he joined The Bad Plus, releasing a self titled album with the band in 2022 followed by Complex Emotions in 2024. Speed is a founding member of several long running groups, including The Claudia Quintet and Human Feel, the latter of which he started at the New England Conservatory with Andrew D'Angelo, Jim Black and Kurt Rosenwinkel. His group Broken Shadows focuses on reinterpreting music by Ornette Coleman and Julius Hemphill alongside Tim Berne, Reid Anderson and Dave King. With somewhere around eighty albums to his name as a leader or sideman, he is one of the more quietly indispensable figures in contemporary jazz.