SCOTT AMENDOLA

“Nobody fuses like Scott Amendola – he’s not pandering, he just loves to rock, and freak out, and write actual tunes, and improvise, and devise a space where great musicians can explode.” Greg Burk, metaljazz.com

“Amendola’s music is consistently engaging, both emotionally and intellectually, the product of a fertile and inventive musical imagination.” Los Angeles Times

“If Scott Amendola didn’t exist, the San Francisco music scene would have to invent him.”
Derk Richardson, San Francisco Bay Guardian

“Amendola has complete mastery of every piece of his drumset and the ability to create a plethora of sounds using sticks, brushes, mallets, and even his hands.” Steven Raphael, Modern Drummer 

“…drummer/signal-treater Scott Amendola is both a tyrant of heavy rhythm and an electric-haired antenna for outworldly messages (not a standard combination).” Greg Burk, LA Weekly

For Scott Amendola, the drum kit isn’t so much an instrument as a musical portal. An ambitious composer, savvy bandleader and capaciously creative foil for some of the world’s most inventive musicians, Amendola applies his rhythmic virtuosity to a vast array of settings. His closest musical associates include guitarists, Nels Cline, Jeff Parker, Charlie Hunter, Hammond B-3 organist Wil Blades, violinists Regina Carter and Jenny Scheinman, clarinetist Ben Goldberg, players who have each forged a singular path within and beyond the realm of jazz.

No project better displays Amendola’s big ears and musical ambitions than “Fade To Orange”, an orchestral piece commissioned as part of the Oakland East Bay Symphony’s Irvine Foundation-funded New Visions/New Vistas initiative. The roiling work premiered to critical acclaim at Oakland’s Paramount Theater on April 15, 2011. As a sideman, Amendola has performed and recorded with a vast, stylistically varied roster of artists, including Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, Mike Patton, Mondo Cane, John Scofield, Cibo Matto, John Dieterich from Deerhoof, Wadada Leo Smith, Bruce Cockburn, Madeleine Peyroux, Joan Osborne, Jacky Terrasson, Shweta Jhaveri, Phil Lesh, Sex Mob, Kelly Joe Phelps, Larry Klein, Carla Bozulich, Wayne Horvitz, Johnny Griffin, Julian Priester, Sonny Simmons, Pat Martino, Jim Campilongo, Bobby Black, Larry Goldings, Paul McCandless, Rebecca Pidgeon, and the Joe Goode Dance Group.

Scott Amendola Trio PDXMMXVIII w/ Jeff Parker & Paul Bryan

PRE-ORDER

No drummer on jazz’s expansive landscape has collaborated more fruitfully with era-defining guitarists than Berkeley’s Scott Amendola. His new album, Scott Amendola Trio PDXMMXVIII with Jeff Parker and Paul Bryan, adds an enthralling new chapter to his journey, reuniting him with Parker, the polymorphously creative guitar seeker, and bassist Paul Bryan (best known as the Grammy Award-winning producer of several albums by Aimee Mann).

Slated for release on CD and vinyl by Jealous Butcher Records on Nov. 6th, 2026, it’s a poised and sinewy set gleaned from Amendola’s PDX Jazz Festival performance in 2018 with his Los Angeles-based comrades. The three musicians first met and played together at Berklee in the late 1980s and seized the opportunity to reconvene in Portland.

A single from the album, the briskly zig-zagging “Momentum & Backlash,” drops in September, 2026. With Parker sashaying over the double-time rhythm section tandem, it’s an Amendola piece commissioned by Intersection for the Arts and first released on the 2018 Invisible Bird project Flutter to Fuzz (with Brian Blade Fellowship guitarist Dave Devine).

The bulk of the tunes are drawn from Lift, the acclaimed 2010 Scott Amendola Trio album with Parker and the late bassist John Shifflett, though Parker’s extended intro on the title track, a numinous solo statement, infuses “Lift” with quiet grandeur. The album opens with “Swagger of the Tail Wagger,” a jaunty, episodic piece also gleaned from Flutter to Fuzz. On the supple, surging “Cascade” and the beatific closer “Tudo De Bom” the group plays with textural acuity and distilled lyricism.

A New York native who moved to San Francisco in 1992, Amendola has been a creative force for more than three decades. He first gained international attention as the only non-guitarist with T.J. Kirk, the Grammy-nominated quartet with Will Bernard, John Schott, and Charlie Hunter. He’s toured and recorded intermittently with Hunter ever since, while also working extensively with Wilco’s Nels Cline and Jim Campilongo.

As a bandleader, Amendola has created a large and varied body of work, from an orchestral commission to volatile duos. As the Los Angeles Times notes, “Amendola’s music is consistently engaging, both emotionally and intellectually, the product of a fertile and inventive musical imagination.”

Scott’s involved in various working bands including: Scott Amendola Trio, Scott Amendola Band, Mike Patton’s Mondo Cane, Spaghetti, Ghost Engineers, SticklerPhonics, Nels Cline Singers, Nels Cline and Scott Amendola are Stretch Woven, Amendola vs. Blades, among others!