Rick Holzgrafe - Cornet
Rick started playing trumpet in Santa Barbara, California, in 3rd grade. He developed a taste for jazz by listening to his parents' collection of big-band records. In high school, he was introduced to dixieland by his friend and class mate Mark Vehrencamp (Mark is now a well-known tuba player in the Portland area).
While attending UCLA, Rick joined some young local musicians who had gotten their own intro to Dixieland by listening to the Firehouse 5 + 2 at Disneyland. They had formed a youth band, the Fink Street Five, and were performing in pizza parlors and at special events. Fink Street had a fine cornetist in Bryan Shaw and later Larry Wright, but they needed a trombonist. Bandleader Jeff Beaumonte offered to give Rick a trombone (purchased for $10 from a junk shop, and worth every penny) if he would learn to play it for the band, so he did. He even learned to play it in tune—eventually, after Jeff threatened to put click-stops on the slide (in his own defense, Rick wishes to point out that the problem with that slide was not really in stopping it at the right place, but in getting the slide to move at all).
Rick moved to the San Jose area to work in the software industry after five years or so with Fink Street. There he joined John Scott's Apex Jass Band, where he continued to play trombone.
After a bit of a hiatus, occasioned in part by small children, Rick returned to the cornet as his main instrument. He performed for twenty years as a regular member of John Soulis' Mission Gold Jazz Band, and as a substitute and occasional member of a number of other Bay Area bands including Bill Armstrong's Churchill Street Rhythm, the Silicon Gulch Jazz Band, and Ted Shafer's Jelly Roll Jazz Band.
In 2013 Rick moved to Oregon, where he was immediately snapped up by the Black Swan Classic Jazz Band (well, almost immediately. A certain amount of blackmail and bribery may have been involved).
Rick's discography includes Black Swan's 2016 recording, Hoagy, Heart & Soul