Don Sickler plays trumpet, he is an arranger, producer,
conductor, orchestrator, publisher and consultant. He hails from
Spokane, Washington and was awarded first prize by Donald Byrd
for being an outstanding jazz soloist. He had earlier met Byrd,
when as a Down Beat scholarship winner he was attending a Stan
Kenton stage band camp, where Byrd was teaching in the early 1960's.
He took advice from Byrd and studied at the Manhattan
School of Music earning a master's degree in trumpet in 1970.
He worked for United Artists as a production manager
and upon leaving them in 1979 he started his own full-service
jazz publishing firm, Second Floor Music. Some of Don's other
noteworthy activities include conducting a Gil Evans retrospective
in New York in 1983 and becoming musical director and trumpeter
for Philly Joe Jones' "Dameronia" recording, using his
own faithful reconstructions of Tadd Dameron's charts.