Sam Sadigursky

Sam Sadigursky, born April 17, 1979, in Los Angeles, California, is a clarinetist, saxophonist, flutist, and composer. Both of his parents are classically trained musicians who emigrated from the former Soviet Union: his father, Isaac Sadigursky, is an accordionist and clarinetist who later became a piano technician, and his mother, Raya Sadigursky, is a classical pianist and piano teacher. Sadigursky began playing piano briefly as a young child, took up saxophone at age 11, and added clarinet to his studies at age 15.

During his high school years, Sadigursky received the John Coltrane Young Artist Award, the NFAA YoungArts award, and the Music Center Spotlight Awards. He was also selected as a member of the Grammy All-American High School Big Band and traveled to Japan as part of the Monterey Jazz Festival All Stars. In that same period, he performed alongside Brad Mehldau, Milt Hinton, Charlie Byrd, and Bob Florence, and appeared at Carnegie Hall as part of the JVC Jazz Festival.

Sadigursky enrolled at William Paterson University in 1997 and graduated in 2001. While still a student, he recorded an album with the collective group Spirals, which included Jacob Sacks, Don Peretz, and Eivind Opsvik. He also appeared on veteran Japanese clarinetist Eiji Kitamura's album Jazz Party, alongside bassist Ray Brown, cornetist Bill Berry, and drummer Jake Hanna, and toured with pianist and GRP recording artist Sergio Salvatore.

His performing and recording career spans a wide range of collaborators, including the Mingus Orchestra, Gabriel Kahane, Fred Hersch, Tom Jones, Darcy James Argue, Linda Oh, Anat Fort, Nico Muhly, Judd Greenstein, Jamie Baum, and Max ZT. On the Latin music scene, he has worked with Edmar Castaneda, Lucia Pulido, Pablo Mayor's Folklore Urbano, Toto la Momposina, Sofia Rei, and US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, among others. Sadigursky is also recognized within the Reform Jewish music scene, having performed with many noted cantors.

Since 2005, Sadigursky has been a member of Darcy James Argue's Secret Society. The ensemble's 2009 album Infernal Machines received a Grammy nomination in the big band category. Their 2013 follow-up, Brooklyn Babylon, was based on a multimedia collaboration with artist Daniel Zezelj that debuted at Brooklyn Academy of Music and also earned a Grammy nomination. A third project, Real Enemies, released in 2016 and likewise debuted at BAM as a multimedia show, received an additional Grammy nomination in the big band category. In 2020, Sadigursky became a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble.

From 2017 to 2019, Sadigursky served as the onstage clarinetist for the Broadway musical The Band's Visit. The production won 10 Tony Awards, the Grammy Award for Cast Album of the Year, and a Daytime Emmy Award for its appearance on the Today Show. His film and television work includes the soundtrack to the 2004 film Seeing Other People, Clint Eastwood's Monterey Jazz Festival: 40 Legendary Years, the 2013 HBO documentary Six by Sondheim, the incidental music for the 2013 Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the documentary Knock Down the House, Rebecca Hall's 2021 film Passing, and Godfrey Reggio's Once Within a Time from 2022.

As a bandleader, Sadigursky released his debut album, The Words Project, in 2008 on New Amsterdam Records. The album presents his original musical settings of poetry and features vocalists Monika Heidemann, Becca Stevens, Heather Masse, and Noam Weinstein. Critic Steve Smith of Time Out New York named it one of the top ten releases of the year and selected it as the vocal album of the year. The project continued with Words Project II in 2010, featuring settings of texts by Langston Hughes, Audre Lord, and Dunya Mikhail, among others. Words Project III: Miniatures followed in 2011, co-produced by Michael Leonhart and recorded over the course of a year using layered voices, loops, brass, strings, percussion, and electronics. Words Project IV, recorded in France in 2013 with vocalist Christine Correa, pianist Laurent Coq, bassist Yoni Zelnik, and drummer Karl Jannuska, drew on texts by Fernando Pessoa, Carl Sandburg, Bertolt Brecht, and George W. Bush, among others. Also in 2013, Sadigursky released Crosswords: Mots Croises, a collaboration with Laurent Coq developed through a 2009 French American Cultural Exchange grant from Chamber Music America, featuring dual-language settings of poems in French and English. In 2015, he released Follow the Stick on BJU Records, an album built around clarinet-led jazz instrumentation.

Sadigursky has received grants and awards from Chamber Music America, the Jerome Foundation, ASCAP, and the Puffin Foundation. His work has been covered by The New York Times, JazzTimes, All About Jazz, and the Detroit Free Press, and he has appeared as a guest on WNYC's Soundcheck, WNYC's Ear to Ear, The Jazz Session, and Minnesota Public Radio's The Jazz Connection. His performance credits include the Newport Jazz Festival, the Kennedy Center, the London Jazz Festival, the Moers Festival in Germany, Radio France, the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Monterey Jazz Festival, the BMW Jazz Festival in Brazil, Winter Jazz Fest in New York City, Jazz a Parque in Bogotá, Colombia, and the Wangaratta Jazz Festival in Australia.