Theo Croker

Theo Croker is a storyteller who speaks through his trumpet. A creative who refuses boundaries, the GRAMMY Award-nominated artist, composer, producer, thought leader, and influencer projects his voice through the music. After seven years of sojourn in Shanghai, Croker crash-landed with a simmering original sound on the 2014 Dee Dee Bridgewater-assisted album "Afro Physicist". Following the success of "Escape Velocity" in 2016, he ascended to a new stratosphere with "Star People Nation" in 2019. The record garnered a nomination in the category of "Best Contemporary Instrumental Album'' at the 62nd GRAMMY Awards. It attracted widespread critical acclaim including The New York Times who called it “an album that gallivants from swirling, left-field hip-hop beats to propellant swing to entrancing passages of African percussion. Through it all, Croker’s understated trumpet playing holds his small band together with swagger and poise.” Along the way, he also lent his sound to platinum selling albums by everyone from J. Cole to Ari Lennox while touring his band across the globe many times over. In 2020, he hunkered down at his childhood home in the midst of the Global Pandemic and wrote his sixth full-length album, "BLK2LIFE || A FUTURE PAST" [Sony Music Masterworks]. BLK2LIFE || A FUTURE PAST is a contemporary oratorio inspired by the forgotten hero's journey of becoming through the universal origins of blackness. On the record, Theo unpacks moments of heroism, trials, tribulations, awakenings, and apotheosis within a musical pastiche brought to life by a myriad of fellow cultural renegades and threaded together by his playing. Traditions of the past, foundations in the present, & explorations of the future. A sonic celebration & reclamation of Afro-origin. BLK2THEFUTURE