Born in Durham, NC and raised in Raleigh, NC, Chris Boerner took to music as a young lad picking up the saxophone at age 8. A few years later he traded in that saxophone for a guitar and found his true calling. Starting out playing in rock’n'roll bands in middle and highschool this soon led to more serious study of the guitar in college. At Duke University Chris graduated with a music major concentrating in Jazz and Classical Guitar.
It didn’t take long from then for Chris to become a vibrant member of the Triangle music scene. After a few years playing mostly jazz gigs he turned his focus to original music. He became a founding member of the jazz-hip-hop collective, The Mighty Burners, who released their debut Hot Ones Now in 2004. Working with this band led to a love of recording and producing. Since, he has recorded and produced for nearly every band he’s played with. In 2005 Chris released his debut as a bandleader, the jazz instrument album, Incoming. Since then he has recorded and toured with many Triangle-based bands including The Proclivities, Mosadi Music, Who’s Bad, Jeanne Jolly, The Small Ponds, and more recently The Foreign Exchange.
Currently Chris continues to hone his craft as a player, composer, recording engineer and producer. In 2010, he picked up the 8-string guitar and quickly started a new group, The Hot at Nights, with good friends Nick Baglio and Matt Douglas. Hopefully, more history to come on that soon…
The Hot @ Nights Bio
Says one Carolina newbie to one Carolina native, “Dang! I knew it would be hot in the Summer down here, but I had no idea that it would get even hotter at night!!” Meteorologically speaking, there is a scientific explanation for this phenomenon. But as far as the Raleigh-based exploratory jazz trio called The Hot at Nights, there is no explanation for them. 8-string guitar virtuoso Chris Boerner leads the group, with Matt Douglas on sax/woodwinds and Nick Baglio on drums. The group melted together in Boerner’s studio over the many sweltering evenings of Summer, 2010. Though largely improvisational, the group’s compositions pull from contemporary songwriters, classic funk, pop, rock, and of course the electric avant garde stylings that have spanned the last 30 years of contemporary jazz. Complex rhythms can quickly transform into head-bobbing groove fare. Simple melodies coaxed by all three players can explode into cacophonous meteor showers at the drop of a dime. Their limits go as high as the stratosphere and deep into the Earth’s mantle. Both of which keep them sweating… even after the sun goes down.