Michael Occhipinti

Occhipinti approaches jazz guitar with a spirit of experimentation that stretches the instrument’s possibilities without severing ties to the genre’s foundational principles. In addition to issuing his own solo recordings, he shares leadership of the sixteen-member NOJO, formally known as the Neufeld-Occhipinti Jazz Orchestra. A graduate with honors from York University in Toronto, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in music, he draws fluency from funk, R&B, blues, and musical theater. Those varied experiences surface both in his NOJO projects and in his individual work, where listeners may detect resonances that stretch from Jimi Hendrix through Duke Ellington to the Art Ensemble of Chicago and further afield. Occhipinti deliberately weaves influences beyond standard jazz sources into his compositions, a stance made clear on the 2000 album Creation Dream, an adventurous set of instrumental readings drawn from the catalog of Canadian singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn.