To hear the trumpeter Dominick Farinacci is to be captivated by his sound — a warm, open, compassionate tone that can deliver unabashed joy or heartrending poignancy with remarkable directness. Or, as the New York Times has described Farinacci over the years: “a trumpeter of abundant poise,” who “plays beautifully, with expressive control” and “brings true musicality.”

As such, he ranks among the most acclaimed trumpet players, educators and humanitarians of his generation, with a list of career achievements that push beyond the conventional notions of recognition for a jazz musician. 

Farinacci was just 17 when one of his most important mentors, Wynton Marsalis, chose him to perform in a special program for PBS. Hailing from Cleveland, a jazz town with an enduring, old-school system of apprenticeship in place, Farinacci impressed with his deep understanding of trumpet influences both common (Louis Armstrong, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan) and too often overlooked among newer players (Harry James, Charlie Shavers, Fats Navarro).   

In 2001, he opened new doors as a member of Juilliard’s inaugural class of jazz-studies majors. While still a student, he hit the ground running as a recording artist and bandleader — first in Japan, where he released eight albums in short order, and later globally. 

At Marsalis’ request in 2012, Farinacci took on one of the most transformative endeavors of his career: helming an outpost of Jazz at Lincoln Center in Qatar, as a Global Ambassador for that storied institution. It proved a wholly unique challenge that involved maintaining the integrity of JALC while also welcoming the local community and engineering inspiring cross-cultural dialogues. “I found that when you meld our jazz history with their cultural history, then all of a sudden there’s common ground to work with — and that kind of artistic collaborative nature made the music much more accessible,” Farinacci explains. “For a few years it was an incredible scene, night after night — a lot of young people coming out and hanging, really digging the music.”

His star-filled 2016 album, Short Stories, was a joint venture with music-industry legend and producer Tommy LiPuma, a fellow Clevelander. It featured some of the greatest jazz and session musicians of our time, like Christian McBride and Steve Gadd, as well as a prescient feature for the star singer-songwriter Jacob Collier. Six years later, Farinacci received the Cleveland Arts Prize, one of his hometown’s most prestigious honors, becoming part of a legacy that includes artists as diverse as Toni Morrison, the Black Keys and the landmark composer-conductor George Szell. His list of distinctions goes on.

 But for Farinacci, achievement — or even the music itself — isn’t the point. As he toured throughout his 20s and into his 30s, he took note of how excellent performances brought about a palpable feeling of uplift and healing in his audiences. “I really started to think about the profound impact that music has on people of all different walks of life and different experiences,” he says. Steadily, as a natural outgrowth of his musical devotion, Farinacci began finding his way into creative enterprises of real meaning and pathos.  

In 2011, Farinacci’s mother received a staggering diagnosis of stage-three cancer — an event the trumpeter found too daunting to face head-on. “I was in denial about it to the point where I was absent from properly supporting her,” he admits. So he channeled his fears and anxieties into a kind of composition project: He’d write a piece reflecting the opposite of his feelings at that turbulent time. “I wanted to write a predictable melody,” he says. “I wanted to write a beautiful, serene melody to contrast the chaos that was happening.”

The resultant piece, “A Prayer for You,” became the impetus for a lauded TED Talk that Farinacci gave at the Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C., in 2014. A decade later, he was finally able to record his composition for the debut project by his group TRIAD.

That exercise in creative empathy, in seeking optimism in the midst of grief and trauma, informed what is Farinacci’s most ambitious and visionary undertaking to date: Modern Warrior LIVE, a moving multidisciplinary work that opens up new pathways for what a performance can be — or, as Farinacci describes it, “a true hybrid of first-person storytelling with live music and film integration.”

With rare intimacy and understanding, Modern Warrior LIVE tells the story of U.S. Army veteran Jaymes Poling, with whom Farinacci developed the project. Through Poling’s gripping original narration and Farinacci’s innovative musical direction, Modern Warrior LIVE chronicles the journey of the contemporary American veteran across multiple deployments and the poignant, complex and often ambivalent process of readjusting to civilian life. “Jaymes’ story of coming back home after the war broke all my civilian preconceptions of the returning veteran,” Farinacci reflects. 

But within Modern Warrior LIVE’s tale of military service and its aftereffects is an even more universal narrative about the importance of addressing and supporting mental health. “This is a timeless story of humanity and working to overcome struggle, and how that experience impacts you,” Farinacci explains. “It made me think more about my own psychological well being.”

To bring this production to veterans and communities across the country, Farinacci and Poling formed a national nonprofit and touring company — an effort not too far from a road Farinacci had been down before. To generate his regular audience in Doha, he had to recruit key cultural and government influencers as champions and create an effective campaign for fundraising, all while clearing unforeseen political and financial hurdles. To make Modern Warrior LIVE a reality, Farinacci built the nonprofit with Poling, assembled a high-profile board, and pursued the support of celebrated veterans and military figures in earnest.

Modern Warrior LIVE has now been performed well over 150 times, and has received overwhelming recognition from audiences and military leaders alike. General Jim Mattis called Modern Warrior LIVE a “necessary and worthy mission paying our respects to all veterans and, by extension, to the Gold Star families.” Modern Warrior LIVE has also been performed at Amazon Headquarters and at the National Council for Mental Wellbeing Conference.   

Today, in addition to Modern Warrior LIVE, Farinacci works in a range of formats and ensembles. TRIAD is an ingenious collective band featuring the trumpeter with accordionist Michael Ward-Bergeman and Christian Tamburr playing marimba and vibraphone. Though the unusual instrumentation and bold repertoire choices — from Piazzolla to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins — might suggest a conceptual bent, TRIAD is simply an instance of Farinacci joining up with musicians and people he adores. “The big idea there is artists of different backgrounds who have a really great chemistry coming together,” he says.

Also of note is his continuing series of Reflections EPs, comprising gorgeous renditions of favorite standards in a duo format — just Farinacci’s enveloping trumpet and a lineup of best-of-generation pianists, among them Aaron Diehl and Dan Tepfer. “It’s a chance to document a lot of the beautiful old songs I grew up playing,” Farinacci says. Already, Reflections has become perhaps the most successful recording project of his career, racking up more than 12 million streams on Spotify.

Farinacci continues to forge ahead as an educator, directing the Tri-C JazzFest Academy in Cleveland. In his work as a mentor, he strives to “instill a combination of the most valuable things I learned during college, coupled with the many things that I wish, looking back, I would have learned,” he says. Regarding the latter, he uses his hard-won experience to educate student musicians in the fundamentals of the music business — “the real-world artistic experience combined with more sobering discussions about how to make a living playing this music,” he says. 

In Cleveland, Farinacci witnessed the plight of the working artist as a child, and spent years learning from and playing with salt-of-the-earth musicians whose only ambition was to play well. One of them was his most pivotal early mentor, the saxophonist Ernie Krivda. “There’s literally nobody else on the planet who sounds like Ernie,” Farinacci says. “He brings jazz history into the DNA of his music, but in terms of how he plays, I’ve still never heard anybody like him.

Farinacci has built his career in that image of individualism — not only as a player and composer, but as a scene-builder, a creator of innovative new projects, and an artist whose first priority is compassion.

- Written by Evan Haga