Jeff Oster is an American brass instrument player who has recorded flugelhorn or trumpet with artists such as William Ackerman, founder of Windham Hill Records. He got his start in the Coral Gables (Florida) Senior High School Band of Distinction playing under William &Uncle Willie& Ledue.
In 2004, Oster and Ackerman collaborated on, and Ackerman produced Oster's 4-track EP, At Last, and followed this with his CD Released in 2005. Released won the 2005 Album of the Year and Best Contemporary Instrumental Album awards at the NAR Lifestyle Music Awards presented by NewAgeReporter.com, a music airplay tracking agency. At Last, co-written by Jeff Oster and Will Ackerman, and performed by Jeff Oster, Will Ackerman, Philip Aaberg and Happy Rhodes, also won the Best New Age Song award at the 2005 Independent Music Awards.[1] Also appearing on Released are Jeff Pearce (American artist), Charlie Bisharat, Philip Aaberg, Gregory Douglass, Bryan Carrigan, Taylor Barefoot, Tom &T-Bone& Wolk, Jeremy Mendicino, and Happy Rhodes.
Oster has played flugelhorn on albums by Karen Marie Garrett, Rory Sullivan, Matt Millecchia, Kori Linae Carothers, Lawrence Blatt, Will Ackerman, Fiona Joy Hawkins, Rocky Fretz, Stanton Lanier, Frank Smith, Garneau, Ann Sweeten, Tim Gaetano, Bob Belden, Shambhu Vineberg, Heidi Breyer and Jamie Bonk.
In 2007, Ackerman produced True, which features music composed by Oster and Ackerman, Ugandan vocalist Samite, Jan Pulsford and Patrick Gorman, and guest performances from Michael Manring, Philip Aaberg, Eugene Friesen, Keith Carlock, Jan Pulsford, Patrick Gorman, Samite, Derrik Jordan, Bryan Carrigan and singers Melissa Kaplan from Splashdown, and Noah Wilding.
In December, 2007, one of the songs from True, the composition &Saturn Calling&, written and arranged by Jeff Oster, and mixed by Grammy winning engineers Bruce Swedien and Corin Nelsen, won the Best New Age Song award at the 2008 Independent Music Awards.[2] Listeners of the national radio program, Echoes, voted True as its 10th place winner for The 2007 Listeners Poll, and the Echoes staff chose it as one of the 25 Essential Echoes CD's for 2007. True won the 2007 NAR Lifestyle Music Awards for Album Of The Year and Best Contemporary Instrumental Album in March, 2008. In 2009, Echoes listeners voted True No. 88 of the 200 CDs for 20 Years of Echoes poll
On April 23, 2008, NASA and JPL added a profile of Jeff Oster and his song &Saturn Calling& to the NASA and Cassini-Huygens websites. &Saturn Calling& includes a sound excerpt from the Cassini spacecraft's recording of the auroras of Saturn. Listen to &Saturn Calling& here.