BIOGRAPHY

Gerald Massoud was born in Dallas, Texas in 1984 and began playing trumpet at age 10. After hearing the famous “Amazing Grace” bass solo by Victor Wooten, Gerald purchased an electric bass. His high school band director suggested a path towards jazz and Gerald began learning the upright bass by digesting the work of Ray Brown, Paul Chambers, and the many great bassists of the bebop era. Following high school, Gerald moved to Tucson, Arizona to study music with Patrick Neher, his bass teacher, and Jeff Haskell, his mentor. He learned classical technique during the day and worked with many local jazz musicians by night. In 2008, he moved to Austin, Texas were he went on the road with Salero, a premiere salsa band in Texas. After two years in Austin, Gerald started graduate school at the University of Houston, studying conducting with Noe Marmolejo, classical music with Dennis Whittaker, and composition with Thomas Hultén and Rob Smith. While working on his Masters and DMA, Gerald won the Houston Public Media Composers Contest, writing new music for the Charlie Chaplin film “The Rink”. This award created new opportunities to write and arrange music for film, small ensemble, jazz orchestra, and symphony orchestra. His most notable commissions were recreating the big band arrangement of “Spinning Wheel” for Lew Soloff and writing an arrangement of “Over There” for Terence Blanchard. In 2011, Gerald worked with Tapestry Dance Company as their bassist for a tour in China showcasing the Souls of Our Feet: A Celebration of American Tap Dance. The show featured classic movie and TV tap sequences performed live with a jazz trio. This same show went on tour in Canada in 2012 for the Vancouver Tap Dance Society Festival. During the summer of 2016, Gerald was invited to perform with the Piccadilly Symphony Orchestra as a guest artist during the International Conductors Festival in Danville, Kentucky. He performed for two weeks and was apart of the community outreach programs for the festival. Gerald Massoud is currently performing in the New York area, writing music for various ensembles all over the United States.