The most famous person from Corvallis plays the trumpet — and how
Botti has one Grammy and five Grammy nominations to his credit, but playing before live audiences is what floats his boat (courtesy Chris Botti)
Updated 4/14/2025 12:45 AM
Any list of candidates for the most famous person born and raised in Corvallis would include model Barbi Minty, filmmaker/animator Brad Bird, production designer/visual effects art director Harley Jessup, author Jon Krakauer, singer Meredith Brooks and, out of the athletics world, personalities such as Harold Reynolds, Mike Riley, Kevin Gregg, Sam Baker, Dave Gambee, Mike Zandofsky, Brad Badger and Talanoa Hufanga.
But topping the list might be Chris Botti, the world-class trumpeter who has been entertaining audiences with his brilliance for four decades.
Who else can count Sting and 16-time Grammy winner David Foster among their best friends? Who has played in the bands of Frank Sinatra, Buddy Rich, Paul Simon, Lady Gaga and Joni Mitchell? Has done collaborations with Aretha Franklin, Bette Midler, Rod Stewart, James Taylor, Joe Cocker, Michael Buble, Toni Braxton, Al Jarreau, George Benson, Aaron Neville, Barbra Streisand, Mark Knopfler, Natalie Cole, John Mayer, Herbie Hancock, Burt Bacharach, Gladys Knight and Vince Gill? Has shared the stage with the likes of Natalie Merchant, Roger Daltrey, Yo-Yo Ma, Steven Tyler, Josh Groban and Katharine McPhee?
Chris Botti’s resume includes all of the aforementioned — and for awhlle, he dated Katie Couric.
It has been a life of style and substance for Botti, at 62 still going strong in his music career. The kid from Corvallis has done pretty well for himself, eh?
“I think yeah,” Botti says in a phone conversation from San Luis Obispo, Calif., where his band is playing a concert in a few hours. “Odds are pretty extreme that you can have a career in music, let alone have your wildest fantasy of a career unfold, and to be able to sell tickets as a trumpet player. The older I get, the more grateful I am.
“I realize how many years I have been at this. Careers shift so quickly in music and sports and everything. The longevity aspect of it has been crucial in a positive way for me. I am not slowing down and I am in my 60s. I feel really lucky for that.”
Botti has won a Grammy. He is a member of the Oregon Music Hall of Fame. He has released 12 studio albums, three of which have gone platinum (one million sales), and four have reached No. 1 on the Billboard jazz chart. Chris is appreciative of all of that, but he holds the thrill of a live performance in the highest regard.
“The real Grammy in a jazz musician’s life,” he says, “is being able to go from city to city and play a show.”
NEW: The Dean of Portland Sports is now on BlueSky.
When I ask about his childhood in Corvallis, Botti is candid.
“Not a lot to do in Corvallis,” he says with a chuckle. “That might have played into a good hand for me. I was super dedicated to music. I ended up going to a college town (Bloomington, Ind.) that is very much like Corvallis, with not a lot of stuff going on. A lot of kids who go to Berklee (in Boston) or Juilliard (in New York City) get tugged away by their attention to the city, with the beat of what is going on. I delayed all of that until later. I hunkered down and practiced and studied pretty diligently. I am happy I did that. Corvallis was great for that.”
Chris’ father, Lido, was a professor at Oregon State who taught Italian and English. His mother, Shirley, was a homemaker who played classical piano. Her mother had been a professional organist. There were two boys — Chris and older brother Dan. (Full disclosure — I coached Dan, a slick-fielding southpaw first baseman, in Little League. He is a sponsor of kerryeggers.com).
When Chris was in third grade, he loved the movie “Brian’s Song.” His parents bought him the album “Henry Mancini and Doc Severinsen: Brass on Ivory,” with Severinsen — an Arlington, Ore., native — playing the theme’s melody on the trumpet.
“Mom tried to get me to play piano early, but I rebelled against it,” Botti says. “Once I saw Doc play, I had my fire lit.”
When Chris was 10, his parents separated and his father moved to Portland. Dan and Chris stayed in Corvallis with their mother. “Dan became a father figure, pushing me to be more driven,” Chris has said. Dan was into sports — he would go on to run track and cross country at Colorado — and Chris’ passion was music. An early inspiration was trumpet legend Miles Davis with his classic “Kind of Blue” album and “My Funny Valentine” tune, which Chris says “represents the beginning of my musical path. It made emotional contact with me.”
When Chris was 14, Shirley Botti made a bold move. She hooked Chris up with Fred Sautter, principal trumpeter for the Portland Symphony.
“Mom cold-called him and said, ‘I want my son to take lessons from you,’ ” Chris says.
“How old is he?” Sautter asked.
“Fourteen,” Shirley said.
“And Fred was like, ‘Sure, bring him up (to Portland),’ ” Chris says. “To my mom’s credit, she understood the need to get your kid a great teacher. So many parents and kids don’t think beyond their school. She was gung-ho about it.
“It is something I would tell any young person. If you want to learn, go to the best person in your city or state and cold-call him. If you are an admirer of someone, go to their concert and get backstage somehow. You would be surprised how many people would be open to imparting a bit of wisdom, or a lot. In the case of Fred Sautter and a couple of other teachers along the way, they taught me heavy.”
Soon Botti began driving to Portland for work experience. If he wanted to spend a weekend, he could stay with his father and grandmother.
“Portland has a great jazz scene, and it was not far from home, so I was able to drive up there all the time and play in the clubs,” he says. “As a 16, 17, 18-year-old, it was a great way to learn the vocabulary of jazz. I can’t stress enough how important that is. You learn jazz from hanging out with older musicians who impart their wisdom. I had that in (drummer) Ron Steen and a bunch of other guys. They were instrumental in me learning.
“I would be 15, 16, sitting in the jazz clubs, and then we would go out and eat Chinese food at night and they would talk about the music they liked. I would have my homework the next day to talk over different stuff — Art Blakey or Miles Davis or whatever. That is a street learning discipline that is old-school jazz. … I feel lucky that I had my upbringing in Oregon.”
During his junior year at Crescent Valley High, Botti was selected as a member of the McDonald’s All-American High School Jazz Band.
“You had to be in a marching band, even though I was in the jazz band (at CV),” he says. “I hated marching bands and the notion that you had to dumb down your trumpet-playing for a team sport. If you are in Oregon, it is cold. It is going to ruin your chops. We marched in the Macy’s Parade (in New York City). It was like seven degrees.”
The McDonald’s band performed two other shows in New York — in the Jerry Lewis Telethon and at Carnegie Hall.
“Overall, it was a great experience,” Botti says. “But the marching-band thing was never my trip.”
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After his junior year at Crescent Valley, Botti was done with Corvallis.
“I had this harebrained idea — I wanted to blow off my senior year of high school,” he says.
He approached the school principal with a proposal — that he be allowed to move to Portland and to fulfill his high school credits while playing in the big band at Mt. Hood Community College.
Mt. Hood’s program was headed by Larry McVey, whose band had come to be a proving ground and regular stop for the likes of Stan Kenton and Mel Torme when they were looking for new players for their bands. At Mt. Hood, Botti played alongside friend, trombonist and future Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Todd Field, who as a youngster had served a stint as bat boy for the legendary minor-league baseball Portland Mavericks.
“Larry liked me and gave me a scholarship so I had money to live on,” Botti says. “I lived in a house with a couple of other musicians. And I was able to play gigs at Portland clubs in the nighttime.”
After graduation in 1981, Botti matriculated at the Indiana University School of Music, one of the country’s finest music schools.
“There were so many musicians I went to school with and lived with there who went on to do great things with their music careers, guys like Joshua Bell and Edgar Meyer and Shawn Pelton,” he says. “There were so many famous teachers, like David Baker and Bill Adam, who was a legendary trumpet teacher. Mr. Adam made me play more physical and practice with more discipline.
“It was a great, solid foundation for music and, after 3 1/2 years there, it gave me the confidence to say, ‘OK, it’s time for me to leave.’ ”
During the summer breaks after his sophomore and junior years, Botti was the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, which allowed him to study with trumpeter Woody Shaw and saxophonist George Coleman.
“That was fantastic,” Botti says. “Spending two summers in New York was awesome. By the time I got to study with Woody, he was going through some serious challenges physically.”
Shaw was a heroin user and was also nearly blind from a degenerative eye disease. He died from kidney failure in 1989 at age 44.
“But Woody was a lovely guy,” Botti says. “And George Coleman was like a textbook on how to conceptualize jazz to all these beautiful lines, with incredible fluidity, through core productions and scales. They were so radically different. Woody was more esoteric; George was more clinical.”
Botti moved to New York in 1985 and quickly found work.
“That first couple of months, I was able to pay the landlord, and I thought I had won an Academy Award,” he quips.
Botti had short touring stints with Frank Sinatra (and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra) and Buddy Rich.
“It went from Sinatra to Buddy, which is like going from the penthouse to the outhouse,” Botti says. “Buddy was a very tough band director, but an amazing drummer and adept with his wit on stage. A lot of people would come to his shows just to heckle him, in a good way. They would get Buddy to have a repartee with him. He was so laser funny and sharp.”
In the 2014 movie “Whiplash,” J.K. Simmons’ role as drumming instructor is based on a series of 12 Buddy Rich tapes, Botti says.
“They were legendary,” he says. “I was in the band on the bus for one of those tapes. We could feel when Buddy was about to lose his mind. In between sets, he would send us out to the bus and just scream at us — and some of the guys recorded it.”
Botti worked 10 shows with Sinatra’s band at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles.
“Sinatra was incredible,” he says. “Here is this guy who walks out on stage, and he is this super icon, and he had a way to appeal to everyone. He would interact with people in the first few rows like Don Rickles. He would always turn around and acknowledge the soloist, the composer of the song, and especially the orchestrators. Nelson Riddle was conducting that particular two-week run, which was a thrill for me.
“Sinatra was a triple threat — acknowledging the people behind him, making a very conversational thing between him and the first few rows, and this big rock star thing with the entire audience. He hung out with guys like Rickles and Dean Martin, who had that old-school patter about them.
“Today, you go to any pop show, everyone has in-ear monitors and they look straight ahead into a teleprompter and are worried about their background dancers. It is not as authentic as I would like to have it. Sinatra was the king of authenticity.”
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Renowned trumpeter Chris Botti is a native Oregonian (courtesy Chris Botti)
In 1990, “I got my first break,” Botti says — a spot in Paul Simon’s band. It was a gig that continued on and off for nine years. Included in that was a Simon/Art Garfunkel reunion tour in 1993.
“It was the first real taste I had for life on the road,” Botti says. “What happens is, people are not honest with themselves. Do they really like being on the road, or do they go on the road so they can get some income and then go home and chill out? I got hooked on the road.
“That band had some absolute legends, including Michael Brecker, arguably along with John Coltrane the greatest saxophone player ever — a monster musician and a great person. Steve Gadd, one of the greatest drummers of all time. Richard Tee played piano. All these icons, and there I was at 28 years old standing next to Brecker. Michael was so famous, especially in the jazz world, that it helped my visibility. It was awesome to be around them.”
During that time, Botti also did studio work.
“When I first moved to New York, I was introduced to Arif Mardin, who ran Atlantic Records with Ahmet Erdigun,” he says. “I would be called to play on a session. I became a hired gun. I played with Bob Dylan and Aretha. I was in Joni Mitchell’s band for a 40-city tour, opening for Dylan. That was an incredible thing. There were only four or five of us in the band, which was really cool because I am such a Joni fan. I did a similar thing with Natalie Merchant. We did a Saturday Night Live show. Natalie was lovely and friendly and a great musician.”
In the early ‘90s, Botti signed with Verve Records and recorded four albums. By the late ‘90s, Botti had become acquainted with Sting.
“I had been loosely introduced to him at different events,” Chris says. “He and Paul Simon lived in the same building in New York. Sting had purchased Billy Joel’s apartment and Paul lived in the upper wing of the building. During that time, Sting did a thing every year called the ‘Rain Forest’ benefit. He heard about me and asked me to play the benefit show. We played ‘Roxanne’ together, almost like a bossa nova, just he and I. It was really fun.”
In 1998, Sinatra died. Botti had the phone number for Sting’s assistant.
Says Botti: “I tracked her down and said, ‘Sinatra passed today. I got to play in his band and have always loved one of his songs. Do you think Sting would consider singing it?’ I thought I wouldn’t hear back. The next day she called and said, ‘He will do it if you will fly to Italy and play on his next album.’ I thought, ‘Jesus, who got the better end of that deal?’ ”
In August 1998, Botti flew to Italy, where he recorded an album with Sting’s band. In December, Botti was in London doing a duet with composer/conductor John Barry when he received a call from Sting, asking Chris to meet him at the Dorchester Hotel.
“He made me this pitch; ‘If you will leave your (solo) career, I want you to be in my band for at least two years, and I will bring the sound of your trumpet to so many people who aren’t jazz fans, and then they’ll be Chris Botti fans,’ ” Botti says. “I was like, ‘Great.’ It turned out to be my big break. It shot my star forward.”
Sting had a word of advice: “Get rid of everything, because we ain’t coming back.”
For the next two years, Botti played with Sting on his “Brand New Day” world tour.
“It was a logical springboard for my career to benefit from all the incredible opportunities I got through that,” Botti says.
The two developed a close friendship. Sting came to affectionately call Chris his “evil younger brother.” After two years, Sting had a proposition for his protege.
“You’re not going to be in my band anymore,” he told Botti. “I want you to be my opening act for the next tour.”
For a couple of years straight, and on and off for eight years, that was Botti’s role. His band would do 40 minutes to warm up Sting’s crowd.
“It was fun, but wow,” Botti says. “Now you are walking out into crowds of between 10,000 and 20,000, and nobody knows who you are. And all of a sudden, we are on the Oprah Winfrey Show, and all hell broke loose in a positive way. All these roads lead back to Sting’s nod of approval. We remain very close to this day.”
When Sting was off the road, Botti had other gigs. There was a stint with Streisand. “Touring with her was like magic,” he says. “She was awesome.” Chris did a few months with Josh Grobin. He did double-bill summer tours with Earth, Wind and Fire and with Diana Krall.
“That places you in front of different audiences,” Botti says. “It is one thing to sell out the Montreal or Monterey jazz festivals. To play Naples, Fla., or Milwaukee or Detroit on a Tuesday night and have people show up, they have to know what to expect. To have rolled in there six months earlier with Josh Grobin and they see you and think, ‘That guy is good. We’ll go see him.’ … That solidified me in terms of starting to sell tickets.”
By this time, Botti had gotten a taste for life on the road and found that he liked it — a lot.
“Over the next eight years, I went without owning any possessions,” Botti says. “I had one suitcase.”
Botti found that he didn’t need a house to call home.
“In 2014, I checked into the Mercer Hotel in New York City and checked out 5 1/2 years later,” he says. “I owned a suitcase and carry-on, and would leave to go on the road with that. It was cheaper to have a (hotel) room than to have to pay taxes on a house.”
In 2013, Botti was quoted as saying, “I am way happier on the road than at home.” During our interview, I ask: Is that still the case?
“I would be lying if I said no,” he says. “You either travel or spend all day in the hotel, and then you get pumped up for the show. You get such an incredible reward from the audience and the energy that comes back to you. I feel great pride for being able to take my great band around on the road.”
And, Botti says, “When I am off the road, I am not the most stable. It is weird. I don’t really know what to do with my time, aside from working out. As long as I can do it, I am committed to this lifestyle.”
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In 2000, Botti signed with Columbia Records and had what he terms “an incredible run with them.” Over the next two decades, he cut several albums and toured the world several times over. He received a Grammy nomination in 2008 for his album “Italia” and three of them in 2010 for the live album “Chris Botti in Boston,”
in which he performed with the Boston Pops Orchestra and shared the stage with Yo-Yo Ma, Steven Tyler, Josh Groban, Katharine McPhee, John Mayer and Sting.
Botti finally won one in 2013 in the Best Pop Instrumental Album category for the album “Impressions.”
If you think winning a Grammy fulfilled Botti’s career, think again.
“The Grammys have turned into a popular music act,” he says. “The classical music and jazz music and stuff that takes a little more thought is demoted to the afternoon. They used to have at least one jazz segment (in the evening portion). It all went south when Rosie O’Donnell was hosting and Joshua Bell, Edgar Meyer and Bela Fleck were playing and Rosie says, ‘Well, here are three guys you have never heard of,’ and cut them down. It was really harsh. And since then, nothing.”
Botti says “awards are kind of meaningless.” He concedes, however, that when he is a guest on a talk show and is introduced as “Grammy winner Chris Botti,” it is a good thing.
“But the actual award and the way the Academy has gone on to treat various types of music … I think a lot of kids would like to hear Yo-Yo Ma play the cello,” Botti says. “Does everything need to be rap and hip hop and pop music to sell to 15-year-olds? Apparently it does.
“I am very grateful I won that thing, but … for a lot of years, that was such a big thing for musicians to acquire. Somewhere along the way, the Grammys stopped giving credibility to music unless it was mainstream pop.”
Meanwhile, Botti continues to be a student of his game.
“If you are going to learn jazz trumpet, you go to the well,” he says. “Whether it’s Clifford Brown or Miles Davis or Freddie Hubbard or Woody Shaw … I am a big fan of all those legends. I study those guys and pick up little stuff here and there from that.”
Though he is not a sports guy, Botti has performed at a number of big events. He played “God Bless America” at Game 2 of the 2005 World Series, Astros vs. White Sox, in Chicago. In 2014, he played the national anthem before a Monday Night football game in Washington D.C., and for a crowd of more than 80,000 and a national TV audience in MetLife Stadium for a Colts-Giants game.
Chris switched to the Blue Note Records label in 2019 but, due to the pandemic, didn’t record an album there until 2022. There was a time when he would do 300 live dates a year. His band still keeps a torrid pace.
“I have been able to be like a bandleader who has a Rubik’s cube with an all-star band,” Botti says. “In doing that, you can’t always get the same people for every show, except my drummer, Lee Pearson, who has been out there hitting it hard with me for a long time. We just tour too much. It is too daunting. A lot of the players have families. From Thanksgiving (2024) to the end of January (2025), we worked every single night. No days off, and two shows a night for 55 straight nights. We just motored. We had a few days off and then went for another month.
Botti has played with many of the greats in music history but has an all-star band of his own (courtesy Chris Botti)
“We have a couple of different violinists. We have two or three pianists that we use, a couple of different bassists. We have a smattering of different singers we feature in and out.”
At the Hollywood Bowl last November, Botti performed at a 75th birthday party for David Foster, one of the most successful music producers of all time, with 16 Grammys and a remarkable series of credits.
“David has had No. 1 hits in five decades,” Botti says. “He and Sting are my favorite guys in the music business. The show that night included Brian McKnight and El DeBarge and Jennifer Hudson and Charlie Puth and Kristin Chenoweth and Andrea Bocelli and Josh Groban and Michael Buble. It was sensory overload with incredible music.”
This summer, Botti is scheduled for two weeks of domestic shows with Foster and his wife, singer Katharine McPhee.
“We have done a double-bill on a few shows in the past,” Botti says. “David plays keyboards and does medleys of all his hits. It is a spectacular show.”
Botti prefers playing vintage equipment. He plays a Martin Committee large-bore Handcraft trumpet made in 1939, a piece he purchased in 2003. He uses a No. 3 silver-plated mouthpiece from Bach made in 1926 and a Leblanc Vacchiano Harmon mute from the 1950s.
“The older stuff is a lot more difficult to maneuver on,” Botti says. “However, it has a beautiful, warmer sound than modern-day trumpets because they were handmade in those days. It’s not like I have not been trying to find an alternative that is easier to play, but from the sound, I can’t find anything like the Martins. “Miles Davis played Martins. Chet Baker played them. Dizzy Gillespie played them. They just don’t make them like they used to. The new trumpets are too metallic. I haven’t been able to play one that has made me feel like I should replace my Martin.”
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Though he lives life in a spotlight, Botti seems a private person. He is fit. He lifts weights, does yoga and cardio and looks younger than his years. In 2004, he was named as one of People Magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People, which surely put him high on the eligible bachelor list. He has never been married, has no children and says he currently does not have a girlfriend.
Says Botti: “It’s a tricky area. You say to (a woman), ‘I will never be home on a weekend.’ They are like, ‘I can come with you on the road.’ But no, nobody wants to get up at 6 a.m. and fly to wherever. It’s not always Paris or London. It’s Poughkeepsie and Paso Robles.
“I have seen so many of my musician friends tragically end their relationships when they are either in a financial hole or their family is disjointed. If you are going to do the family thing, if you are going to be a parent, you have to be there. And that takes an amount of dedication that you have to be serious about. I don’t want to just phone it in.”
Does he feel like he has missed out on anything because of it? Botti pauses for a moment before answering.
“I don’t know the answer because I haven’t experienced that,” he says. “Anyone who has kids would think I’m crazy. Everyone says that having children is the greatest thing. I just haven’t experienced it.
“Maybe I am jaded, but I have seen the other side of that coin where musicians get caught in a tricky situation, and they are not being honest with their partner, or they are not being honest with themselves. The person who gets hurt is the kid.”
Besides music, Botti’s passion is cars, and driving them fast. It is a relatively new pastime for him, starting in 2022 when he bought a Porsche and visited the Porsche Experience Center in Anaheim, where you can drive fast on a 1.3-mile track without fear of street traffic or speeding tickets. Two months later, while on tour in Tokyo, he visited the Porsche Experience there, toured the track and says, “That day changed everything.”
Though he has a house in Beverly Hills, in 2023 he purchased a three-bedroom, 6,100-square-foot abode overlooking the racetrack at the Thermal Club, a members-only motorsport racetrack and club in Thermal, Calif. Thermal is in Riverside County, 25 miles southeast of Palm Springs.
Botti currently owns a fleet of race cars, including two Porsches, a McLaren, a Ferrari and a Lamborghini.
“I get down to Thermal’s when I can get down there,” he says. “There are two tracks — one is 3 1/2 miles, one is 2 1/2 miles — and they are linked up, so there are lots of turns. It is quite a technical track, with not a bunch of elevation but enough lift.
“The best thing is, it is incredibly well-maintained. A lot of times, I am the only one out there, or there might be three or four cars. When I go to my villa on the straightaway, you hear one driver and another minute and a half someone else comes by. It is a very posh thing, and they take care of all the tricks on the car. You just roll out there in the morning and it is all taken care of. It is a safe, well-groomed track and you are not going by walls. There is a lot of room for error.”
With his busy schedule playing music, Botti estimates he gets to Thermal “maybe a couple of days a month.”
“It is thrilling — super fun,” he says. “It gives you something to practice, to learn. It is not completely like playing music, but there are a lot of similarities to it. When the band is on stage, you are rocking out and it is frenetic and then you have to slow everything down and listen to the other musicians in your act. The same thing with driving. You have all the insane noises going on, and you still have to remain calm and navigate your car on the lines of the track. It gets your dopamine going at 8 in the morning, and hopefully that keeps you out of getting in trouble the night before.”
Botti last played Portland in the fall of 2023. Nothing is scheduled for him there now.
“But I am sure I will be back there,” he says. “I would guess in the fall of ’26.”
It will be worth the wait.
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For tour dates and more info about Chris, check out https://www.chrisbotti.com/
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