Tia Fuller

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Episode 24 of the Burning Ambulance podcast features an interview with saxophonist and educator Tia Fuller. Fuller is originally from Colorado, and comes from a musical family: her parents had a group called Fuller Sound, her brother Ashton is a drummer, and her sister Shamie Royston is a pianist who's married to drummer Rudy Royston. She’s recorded five albums as a leader, and has worked with trumpeter Sean Jones, vocalists Nancy Wilson and Diane Reeves, and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington. She has also worked with Esperanza Spalding, and was the saxophonist in Beyoncé’s 10-member, all-female touring band for four years, something we talk about a lot in this interview.

In addition to recording and playing shows, Fuller is an educator – she’s got a masters degree in jazz education and teaches at Berklee in Boston. That’s something else we talk about in this interview, because she was there for the controversy at Berklee last year, where several members of their faculty were let go after accusations of sexual misconduct. So we talk about that, and about what she teaches and how she relates to her own students, about her experience working with the collective We Have Voice, which is organizing to combat inequality and harassment in the jazz scene, and much more.