Theo Croker is a storyteller who speaks through his trumpet. A creative who refuses boundaries, the Grammy-nominated artist, composer, producer, thought leader, and influencer projects his voice through 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, garnering a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. The New York Times 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, Croker also lent his sound to platinum-selling albums by everyone from J. Cole to Ari Lennox while touring with his band around the globe. In 2020, he hunkered down at his childhood home in the midst of the pandemic and wrote his sixth full-length album, BLK2LIFE || A FUTURE PAST. This contemporary oratorio us inspired by the forgotten hero’s journey of becoming through the universal origins of Blackness. On the record, Croker unpacks moments of heroism, trials, tribulations, awakenings, and apotheosis within a musical pastiche brought to life by a myriad of fellow cultural renegades. This sonic celebration and reclamation of Afro-origin seamlessly highlights traditions of the past, foundations in the present, and explorations of the future.