Aquiles Navarro

Aquiles Navarro website

• projects as a leader/co-leader •

• as a sideman •

• video •

Aquiles Navarro & Tcheser Holmes - Live in New York 2024

Aquiles Navarro & Tcheser Holmes - "Pueblo"

• biography •

Aquiles Navarro is a New York-based trumpeter, composer and DJ of Panamanian heritage.
He is also the CEO & Founder of River Down Records, a label that focuses on documenting and expanding the creative sounds and minds of Panamá.
Aquiles derives his sounds from folkloric music, salsa, reggae and everything that were around.
This eclectic music background, based on his upbringing in Panama has led him to collaborate with folkloric musicians, dancers, visual artists, actors, poets and really the world around him.
He studied in Panama with tenor player Carlos Garnett and trumpeter Victor "Vitin" Paz.
After moving to the US, he received a Bachelor's degree in Jazz Performance at the New England Conservatory, and a Master's degree from the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami where he studied with trumpeter Brian Lynch.
He considers himself an improviser, coalescing his range of influences into a unified sonic vocabulary that can be incorporated across genre and medium.
This Canadian-Panamanian trumpeter had a hand in two of the most stirring jazz releases of 2020: Heritage of the Invisible II, with drummer Tcheser Holmes, and Who Sent You?, as a member of the group Irreversible Entanglements (also featuring the blistering poet Moor Mother).
His playing features glorious improvised fanfares as if announcing the arrival of some cosmic dignitary, as well as repeated melodic themes, providing a brightly lit entry point into jazz's outer regions. BBT, - The Guardian.
Navarro is a part of the liberation-oriented free jazz collective, Irreversible Entanglements. After their highly acclaimed self-titled debut album on International Anthem, Who Sent You? was released on March 20th 2020, creating a wave amongst the music world giving a voice to the times we are living in.
Navarro also has a duo project with Brooklyn-based drummer Tcheser Holmes. The duo, entitled Heritage of the Invisible, merges each members music and life background through in real time improvisations. Having collaborated for almost a decade, the way in which they blend their rhythms and harmonies has become telepathic in nature.
Heritage of the Invisible has two self-released albums, and a third one released on International Anthem "Heritage of the Invisible II" in the fall of 2021, receiving great reviews.