About
Brandon Scott Coleman is a guitarist, composer, arranger, and producer based in Northern Kentucky, from eastern Kentucky originally. He produces, mixes, and masters records for other artists, and teaches at Northern Kentucky University.
He performs and records with Ben Sollee, Barnweaver, and Spherical Agenda, leads his own trio and quartet, and writes arrangements and orchestrations for other artists.
My versatility has provided me a path from folk music all the way to playing hypercomplex Frank Zappa music with the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra: Juan Trigos' Ella-Miau opera, with new-music density. A very specialized guitarist with exceptional versatility, reading ability, and stylistic gamut.
Those are two separate engagements, incidentally: the Zappa program with the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra is one thing, and Juan Trigos' opera Ella-Miau is another. What they have in common is a density of rhythmic writing that most guitarists don't spend much time around, which is probably why the same phone tends to ring for both.
In practice the year tends to divide roughly three ways.
Roots and Americana records with Ben Sollee and Barnweaver, pop and rock sessions, and the arranging work that grows out of them: string and horn writing for other people's songs.
His own trio and quartet, Chaos Magick, the fusion group Spherical Agenda, and dates with Sam Blakeslee, Dan Pugach, Nicole Zuraitis, Zach Brock, and Noah Preminger.
Long-form composition for his own large ensemble, orchestral and new-music chairs, opera pits, and the arranging work that other people commission.
The bands and long-running collaborations, roots and Americana through jazz and fusion out to beat music and orchestral new music. Open any one for the detail.
Ben Sollee is an Emmy Award-winning cellist, composer, and singer-songwriter. Brandon has written with him, performs and records with him, and appears on Time on Hold (2026) and Long Haul (2024) as well as earlier albums.
Brandon’s orchestral arrangements have been performed by The Louisville Orchestra in connection with this work: the arranging credit that sits furthest up the ladder of anything on this site.
Cincinnati-based alt-Americana and roots-rock, built around songwriters Kyle Swensen and Bennett Miller, with Andrew Gillum on drums and Brandon on guitar.
The band describes itself better than anyone else could:
Three jazz cats and an MFA stay-at-home dad with an acoustic guitar who make roots rock.
The self-titled album was released May 1, 2026, recorded at Legacy Soundworks in Cincinnati with Eric Sheppard, and mixed in Lexington by Grammy-nominated engineer Duane Lundy (Jim James, Sturgill Simpson, Ringo Starr).
Louisville Public Media’s Laura Shine covered the record in May 2026, calling it “an excellent self-titled album” and naming Brandon as “Eastern Kentuckian Brandon Scott Coleman on guitar.”
The band’s mashup of Nirvana’s “All Apologies” with The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” is on YouTube, and is a fair introduction to how the group thinks.
Chaos Magick is the large ensemble under Brandon’s own name: strings, long-form composition, and dynamic interplay. It is the project where the writing gets room to run: pieces built to develop over their full length rather than to state a head and blow on it.
The band is a seven-piece: the long-running trio with Ben Tweedt on piano, a string pair of Grammy-winning violinist Zach Brock and cellist Michael G. Ronstadt, and Patrick Duke Graney on percussion alongside the kit. Violin and cello mean the strings are a real section rather than a colour, and a percussionist working next to the drummer is an orchestration decision, not a doubled part. Both are there because the writing asks for them.
In January 2026 they played Memorial Hall in Over-the-Rhine for Jazz at the Memo. The venue described the program as “colorful compositions that toe the line between precision and spontaneity,” and put the pitch this way:
Chaos Magick takes the listener on a vibrant journey to be remembered — a cosmic path guided by a dynamic and expressive band playing colorful compositions that toe the line between precision and spontaneity.
The rhythmic writing underneath it is the thing Brandon has spent the longest on:
One of my HUGE musical passions is a rhythmic language that I’ve developed based on several musical influences: the strict subdivisions of Frank Zappa’s art music, the flowing rubato of impressionist Classical music, the dynamic interplay of jazz music, the structural subtleties of Indian Classical music, and the natural rhythms of human speech and movement.
The rhythm section is the same one documented across a decade of records (Matt Wiles on bass and Jeff Mellott on drums), most recently on the trio record Trust Fall (2024).
Original jazz-fusion, with Matt Wiles on bass, Ben Tweedt on keys, and Devon Leigh on drums.
Arcane Wisdom (2021) was recorded at Golden Mean Studios; the self-titled album followed in 2025. The group’s own description places it “from the cutting edge of today’s fusion, while also harkening to the reckless abandon and pure energy of groups like Tony Williams Lifetime, Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Return to Forever.”
The trio and quartet under Brandon’s own name: Decisions (2013), Infinite Loop (2017), Aquatic (2019), The Watchmaker (2020), Phobos (2020), and the live record THE WATCHERS (Live 3.18.24).
On the trio, in his own words:
My trio with Matt Wiles on bass and Jeff Mellott on drums has developed a language around this kind of flow over the last ten years and it continues to evolve in many different ways.
Infinite Loop drew the best press Brandon has: Textura called it “distinguished by stylistic diversity” and wrote that he “plays with a fluidity and intelligence that suggests a long and satisfying career lies ahead.”
The most recent trio record is Trust Fall (2024): three original Trust Fall movements set among standards, with Wiles and Mellott.
The large-ensemble project grew out of this band: Chaos Magick — strings, long-form composition, and the January 2026 Memorial Hall program with Zach Brock (its own entry above).
Doctor Bionic is the project of Cincinnati producer Jason Grimes (Grimez). Brandon is featured across the discography: six-plus releases, which makes it the single largest artist block in his catalogue.
Grimes was formerly the producer for the Cincinnati hip-hop group MOOD, came up in early-’90s East Coast hip-hop digging for jazz and funk samples, and founded the independent label Chiefdom Records in 2015. Doctor Bionic records are also issued by Colemine Records. The sound has been described as raw, soulful instrumental hip-hop (“instrumental b-movie psych-hop”) built from analog gear plus live Cincinnati session players.
Brandon’s playing on these records was cut up and rebuilt into someone else’s beats. Grimes works the way sample-based producers work: players track material, and it gets chopped, layered, filtered, and recombined on an MPC. A guitar part can end up on three tracks and nowhere recognisable.
So the credit is at catalogue level, and that is the honest version: track-level credits genuinely don’t exist for this music.
It is also the credit that stops “versatile” from sounding like a euphemism. The same guitarist who reads G-Spot Tornado off the page hands raw material to a producer and lets it get destroyed.
The Island of Dr. Bionic (2025) · Tune In (2024) · In the Infinite (2023) · Sacrifice (2023) · Shape Shifters (2022) · The God State: An Aural Stimuli (2022)
Guitar chairs in orchestral and new-music settings are won on reading. These are the dates that prove it.
Brandon performed John Adams’ El Niño under the composer’s own baton at the Cincinnati May Festival, Music Hall, May 20, 2022.
Cincinnati Opera, July 2022: the world premiere of Fierce, an opera by Cincinnati composer William Menefield with a libretto by Sheila Williams, developed from more than a year of interviews with young women in Cincinnati. Menefield’s score draws on jazz, modern, and classical idioms.
Premiering an opera means reading music no one has played before.
Guitar soloist for Summermusik’s final Mainstage with the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra: Zappa’s Revised Music for Guitar and Low-Budget Orchestra and G-Spot Tornado, alongside Mozart’s “Haffner” symphony. Eckart Preu conducts.
G-Spot Tornado is from The Yellow Shark. Zappa wrote it on the Synclavier believing no humans could play it.
Ella-Miau, the opera by Juan Trigos · the JOY! (Live from Music Hall) recording with the Cincinnati Pops (2023) · performances with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Cincinnati Opera, Cincinnati Contemporary Jazz Orchestra, concert:nova, and the Kentucky Symphony Orchestra.
Some of this has been orchestral and new-music work: playing under John Adams as he conducted his own El Niño, sitting in the pit for a world premiere at Cincinnati Opera, and this summer a Zappa program with the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra on a bill that also includes Mozart.
Brandon performed John Adams' El Niño conducted by the composer, at Music Hall in Cincinnati. Playing under a composer's own baton on his own major work is a categorically different thing from performing with an orchestra.
The world premiere of Fierce, an opera by Cincinnati composer William Menefield with a libretto by Sheila Williams, which she developed from more than a year of interviews with young women in Cincinnati. Menefield's score moves between jazz, modern, and classical writing.
Playing Zappa's orchestral music on Summermusik's final Mainstage, on a bill with Mozart. G-Spot Tornado is fromThe Yellow Shark.
A recording with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra Pops.
Also performed and recorded with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Cincinnati Opera, Cincinnati Contemporary Jazz Orchestra, concert:nova, and the Kentucky Symphony Orchestra.
One of my HUGE musical passions is a rhythmic language that I've developed based on several musical influences: the strict subdivisions of Frank Zappa's art music, the flowing rubato of impressionist Classical music, the dynamic interplay of jazz music, the structural subtleties of Indian Classical music, and the natural rhythms of human speech and movement.
It's worth saying that this is a private obsession that happens to be useful: the subdivisions he chases for their own sake are the same ones that turn up in a Zappa score.
The Brandon Scott Coleman Trio and Quartet, with Matt Wiles on bass and Jeff Mellott on drums, and Ben Tweedt or Keigo Hirakawa on keys. Also the Sam Blakeslee Quintet and Wistful Thinking, Grammy-winning drummer-composer Dan Pugach and the Dan Pugach Nonet, Grammy-winning vocalist Nicole Zuraitis, Grammy-winning violinist Zach Brock, Noah Preminger, Leo Sherman's Tonewheel, saxophonist Randy Villars, and Keigo Hirakawa. Earlier: Fourth Kind and Miller.
As a session player, Brandon is featured across the discography ofDoctor Bionic, the project of Cincinnati producer Jason Grimes: six-plus releases on Chiefdom and Colemine Records, where his playing is chopped and rebuilt into someone else's beats.
Session guitar heard across many records and on soundtrack work for television and film, notably including DC's Legends of Tomorrow. Session work has been placed on programming from ABC to Netflix.
Brandon teaches at Northern Kentucky University, and takes occasional private students. He has given masterclasses at UNAH-VS in San Pedro Sula and UNAH in Tegucigalpa, Honduras; UDLA in Quito and the Universidad de Loja in Ecuador; and at West Virginia State University, Morehead State University, the University of Virginia, and Belmont University.
Smalls · The Kennedy Center · The Blue Wisp Jazz Club · Bop Stop · BluJazz+ · Bar Next Door at La Lanterna · 55 Bar · Club Bonafide · The Jazz Estate · Cliff Bell's · Rudy's Jazz Room · Jimmy Can't Dance · Merriman's Playhouse. Festivals: Loja Jazz Festival, Ecuador (2012); CBGB Festival, NYC (2014); Columbus Jazz & Rib Fest (2014, 2016).
He has also been a hired gun for classic acts including The Drifters, The Marvelettes, and Il Divo.
Maton Guitars · Levy's Leather Straps.
In his own words: "I infamously wrote a jingle for Eric C. Conn."Conn was the eastern Kentucky disability lawyer whose yellow billboards and self-produced TV ads were unavoidable in the region, and who was later convicted in one of the largest Social Security fraud schemes in US history. Apple TV+ made a four-part documentary about him,The Big Conn, in 2022. Brandon wrote the jingle years before any of that came out.
"I like to put a lot of care into my art. It's quite difficult for me to come up with a 30-second or shorter bite-sized nugget to satiate the appetites of the masses. My time feels better suited crafting something that's more meaningful and deep to me."