TANNER CALDWELL

saxophone

Tanner Caldwell was born in Houston, TX, but it wasn’t until he moved to St. Louis in 6th grade when a saxophone was put in his hands. The rest is history in the making. Tanner started learning about jazz in middle school and high school, and even participated in the extracurricular program JazzU during his junior and senior year of high school. This all lead to studying under Jason Swagler at SIUE. There he truly learned how to practice, and learned not just how to play the saxophone well, but how to play the saxophone intelligently in the context of a live band.

Tanner has now graduated with a degree in Jazz Performance from SIUE, and has been playing music professionally since 2019. Among the groups he’s played with are Bullseye Womprats, Power Play, and Griffin and The Gargoyles. Currently, he is a member of The Red Jackets, The Boat Show, MoSTLy Jazz, and is a founding member of EBTKS (Everything But The Kitchen Sink). EBTKS currently has two albums out, with many compositions being contributed by Tanner himself.

For Tanner, teaching is all about figuring out what a student’s musical candy is and what their musical vegetables are, and building practice habits from there. For example, his musical candy is transcribing, long tones, and jamming. He can’t get enough of those! But Tanner’s musical vegetables are scales and sight-reading, and he tries to keep a good balance of all of these in his practice diet.  Tanner joined Shock City School of Music in 2022 teaching saxophone.