Monthly Residency Trap Music Orchestra

Ryan Easter’s Trap Music Orchestra continues its monthly residency at The Jazz Gallery. The orchestra brings trap music’s modern hip-hop vocabulary into an orchestral jazz setting, drawing on the aural lineage of Black diasporic music. Its approach has been described through the large-ensemble language associated with Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Charles Mingus, rather than as a conventional trap set. The group’s repertoire also makes room for references reaching from disco and Panamanian folk music to Debussy and Earth, Wind, & Fire.

The available material identifies this as Ryan Easter’s Trap Music Orchestra, though it does not firmly establish the ensemble’s home city. Easter is described in one source as being from Richmond, Virginia; another labels the project “Hip Hop | Boston, MA,” without confirming where the orchestra is based. A venue roster presents the band as a substantial ensemble with conductor, brass, reeds, guitar, bass, drums, keys and vocals. Time Out characterizes the project as reimagining trap and hip-hop “through the traditions of orchestral jazz,” and neatly sums up the proposition as “Trap meets jazz (and a whole lot of orchestral muscle).”