Aquarian Family

Bertram Lehman

Based in Boston for over three decades, Bertram Lehmann remains a sought-after player within a multitude of musical contexts in the New England region and beyond, primarily performing Jazz, Latin, and World music. A Berklee College of Music faculty member since 2003, he is active in the Percussion, Ensemble, Ear Training, Africana, and Liberal Arts departments. Equally in demand as a drummer as well as hand percussionist, he continues to draw on his extensive instrumental experience and unique background as both performer and scholar of a wide array of musical genres and styles. Rooted early on in orchestral percussion and first professional exposures as teenager in classical styles, he later on expanded into Jazz and other contemporary genres and since has become an expert on Caribbean and South American drum set practice as well as other Afro-diasporic genres. He also performs in context of a variety of other global traditions, including music from India, Turkey, and the Mediterranean. Bertram Lehmann has appeared and/or recorded with a wide array of renown artists, including The Paul Winter Consort, Paquito D'Rivera, Randy Brecker, Dave Liebman, Anat Cohen, Miguel Zenon, Antonio Sanchez, Romero Lubambo, L. Subramaniam, Danilo Perez, Claudio Roditi, Tiger Okoshi, Oscar Castro-Neves, Eddie Gomez, Kenny Werner, Teodora Brody, the NDR Bigband Hamburg, and Dave Samuels' Caribbean Jazz Project, and has toured internationally in countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, Bermuda, South Korea, British Virgin Islands, Ecuador, Ghana, Mexico, Turkey, Spain, Israel, and Germany. To this date Mr. Lehmann has tracked on over 65 CD recordings, including most recent releases with Mehmet Sanlikol’s WhatsNext (‘The Rise Up’ feat. Dave Liebman; ‘The Turkish Hipster’ feat. Miguel Zenon, Anat Cohen), the Klaus Spencker Trio ('Crossing Borders'), Felipe Salles’ Interconnections Ensemble (‘Home Is Here’ feat. Paquito d’Rivera, Melissa Aldana, Chico Pinheiro, Yosvany Terry, and 'The New Immigrant Experience'), Imagine 5’s self-titled debut, and double-neck guitar sensation Ian Ethan's ‘Earth Suite’, among others. He also can be seen and heard on DŰNYA's ‘Othello in the Seraglio – an Ottoman Coffeehouse Opera’, a full-length movie available on Amazon PRIME Video. Other noteworthy previous CD releases include Mehmet Sanlikol’s ‘WhatsNext’ big band ('Resolution,' feat. Dave Liebman, Anat Cohen, Antonio Sanchez), Felipe Salles' ('The Ugandan Suite' feat. Dave Liebman, and 'Departure' feat. Randy Brecker), as well as David Fiuczynski ('Kif Express'). Some of the distinguished national venues he has performed at include Lincoln Center, Metropolitan Museum, National Sawdust, Birdland, and The Jazz Gallery in New York City; Symphony Hall, The Opera House, Boston Globe Jazz Festival, The Regattabar, Scullers, MIT, Celebrity Series of Boston, The American Repertory Theater, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and many other venues elsewhere such as the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Savannah on Stage, Chicago World Music Festival, The Kennedy Center and The Blues Alley (Washington, D.C.), as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Further international concert highlights include 'Jazz Yatra' Festival (Mumbai), the Tchaikovsky Conservatory (Moscow), 'Panafest' (Accra), Kumho Art Hall (Seoul), ‘Istanbul Jazz Festival’, Teatro Amazonas (Manaus), and Hannover Jazz Week (Germany). Since his graduation from Berklee College of Music in the mid-1990s, Bertram Lehmann has enjoyed decades of, in some cases still ongoing, musical associations with a wide variety of top-tier New England-based ensembles and individual artists. Particularly formative for his evolution as a player proved the quintet of Brazilian vocalist Luciana Souza, the Afro-Latin all-star group Mango Blue led by Ecuadorian bassist Alex Alevar (at the time including players such as Alon Yavnai, Miguel Zenon, Anat Cohen, Alain Mallet), and the idiosyncratic Indo-Jazz ensemble Natraj that c