Ross picked up the trumpet at age 10, coming up in Seattle's renowned Roosevelt High School Jazz Program. While at Roosevelt, Ross appeared at the 2006 International Association of Jazz Education (IAJE) Conference (which has since disbanded), and toured Scandinavia later that summer, performing at the North Sea Jazz Festival. The following year, the band took top honors at Lincoln Center's Essentially Ellington Competition.
Ross continued his studies in the wheat fields of Whitman College, in Walla Walla, WA, where he led his own jazz group while studying improvisation with trombonist David Glenn and composition with John David Earnest, all while earning a B.A. in Chemistry. Amid his studies, Ross lived in Costa Rica, and conducted research at University of Hawaii while gigging in Honolulu's jazz scene.
After graduating from Whitman College in 2011, Ross traveled outside the US for a 16 months, exploring dialects of jazz as a T.J. Watson Fellow. His travels took him to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France, Spain, India, Bhutan, Thailand, South Africa, Brazil, Japan and Cuba, seeing numerous collaborations and new musical friendships. Ross actively implements different music traditions into his own, heavily improvised music. Ross presently lives in Oakland, CA.
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