Jim Macnie of the Village Voice wrote: “Fetchingly situated between Brownian blasts and Milesian murmurs, the trumpeter’s lines cover lots of emotional breadth. It makes for a straight-ahead quintet approach that is quite willing to bend the rules to suit a tune’s forgotten corners. His poetry with standard ballads might hush this room. Evidently he does know what love is.”
Tim Hagans was nominated for Grammy awards for Best Instrumental Composition for “Box of Cannoli” from THE AVATAR SESSIONS (2010 Fuzzy Music); Best Contemporary Jazz CD for REANIMATION (2000 Blue Note) and ANIMATIONIMAGINATION (1999 Blue Note).
Tim Hagans has performed and recorded with Thad Jones, Ernie Wilkins, Joe Lovano, Bob Belden and Dexter Gordon. It was Thad Jones who encouraged Tim to write music, and Hagans' first composition appeared on a Thad Jones Eclipse LP.
For three years he was a member of the Stan Kenton Orchestra. For fifteen years he was artistic director and composer-in-residence for the Norrbotten Big Band, traveling to Sweden to perform, conduct and arrange projects with guests including Rufus Reid, Randy Brecker,
Peter Erskine, and Dave Liebman. THE AVATAR SESSIONS CD features music he created during that tenure, performed by Tim Hagans, the Norrbotten Big Band, and the above mentioned guest artists.
Tim Hagans is the featured soloist on the soundtrack by Howard Shore for the movie The Score, starring Robert DeNiro and Marlon Brando. In 2001 he was the subject of an hour- long documentary made for Swedish television entitled Boogaloo Road). In June 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of music from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki.
Tim Hagans was the recipient of the 2008 IAJE/ASCAP Established Composer commission and was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Composition Grant. Other notable commissions include the Barent’s Composers Orchestra in 2009; NDR Big Band in Hamburg in 2001, 2004, 2013 & 2016; Norrbotten Chamber Orchestra in 2003, 2007 and 2014; and the UMO Jazz Orchestra in Helsinki in 1997 and 2005. He has composed music for Christer Engberg’s play The Hostage and for Jazz Baltica.
In 2007 he began performing and composing for the Michele Brangwen Dance Ensemble, a contemporary dance company dedicated to the use of live original music in performance and the integration of musicians into the stage imagery. In 2009 he created music for GET OUTSIDE, an evening-length work for the Michele Brangwen Dance Ensemble in collaboration with the Norrbotten Big Band. In 2010 he collaborated with author, actor and filmmaker Peter Josyph on THE WAY OF THE TRUMPET, a performance work for improvised trumpet and haiku.
