Tommy Bridges, a child prodigy in jazz music started his career early with the Hollywood Elite. At age 13, he performed alongside famed actor George Segal and actor Conrad Janis of the ‘Mork and Mindy’ TV show, with the Beverly Hills unlisted jazz band at the 1978 Sacramento Jazz festival. This jazz festival featured a young Tommy Bridges on Cornet and young Molly Ringwald as a jazz vocalist. He recorded his first trad jazz jazz album at age 14 on Delmark Records in Chicago, and won the number 7 spot in the Billboard magazine jazz chart in 1980. This same record also had Louis Armstrong’s famed drummer Barrett Deems on it, who played in the 1956 MGM film ‘High Society’ along with Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly with the fabulous Hollywood music score by Cole Porter.
Tommy played the role of young Bix Beiderbecke in the 1978 PLAYBOY JAZZ label film, ‘Ain’t none of them play it like him yet’ about the early jazz legend, who died at Age 28. Hugh Hefner bought the Canadian made film as he loved early Chicago jazz history. The film also starred the famous composer Hoagy Carmichael, the composer of ‘Stardust’ and ‘Georgia on my Mind,’ and ‘Skylark.’
Originally, from the midwest, Bridges relocated to Upstate New York, where the Hollywood connections ran deep; He performed for the famous Baldwin brothers, Alec, Steven, Danny, Billy and Kim Basinger at the Hotel Syracuse; and also for Robert De Niro, Richard Gere, Grace Jones, composer Jimmy Van Heusen, the Jackie Coogan family, and for casino mogul Steve Wynn, of Las Vegas, and numerous others. In 1981, he appeared at the Kool/Newport Jazz festival at age 16, the youngest ever to appear at the time. His band, the Tommy Bridges Jazz Quartet, which has upwards of 61,000 Facebook followers, performs at 80 regional and national events per year. His music is a mix of classic Jazz Standards, Big Band, the Rat Pack, Bossa Nova’s and Samba’s from Brazil. He performs on both Piano and Trumpet.