Bryan Clark is a Nashville, TN based musician, producer, composer, sound designer, educator, writer, podcaster, and creative technologist whose career spans multiple genres, continents, and disciplines. He launched his professional journey opening for jazz guitar legend Larry Carlton and has since built an expansive career as a session musician, recording artist, producer, composer, and sonic experimenter.

Bryan’s work has always lived at the intersection of performance, production, education, and invention. He has collaborated with modern dance troupes, spoken word artists, filmmakers, and international musicians, crafting scores, soundscapes, recordings, and genre-crossing creative works.

His music has been featured on FOX, ESPN, VH1, Lifetime, WB, the History Channel, and the Food Network.

Bryan has worked alongside an eclectic mix of artists, including Bonnie Raitt, Lisa Loeb, Larry Carlton, Scott Henderson, Neal McCoy, Phil Keaggy, Jerry Donohue, Ma Xiaohui, Upchurch, and Kelsea Ballerini.

As the founder of Rainfeather Records, a Nashville-based independent label, Bryan continues to champion innovative, cross-cultural, and artist-driven projects. His release Wire and Wood, a genre-blending collaboration with world-renowned Erhu virtuoso Ma Xiaohui, led to a televised Chinese New Year performance in Shanghai that reached an estimated 900 million viewers across Euro-Asia. Bryan became the first Western artist to be inducted into the Chinese Cultural Heritage Guild.

Bryan’s latest release, 7 Secret Lives of Lucien Midnight, is an ambitious and cinematic work of avant-garde chamber jazz, classical composition, and electroacoustic imagination. The record follows a fictitious character who believes he is living seven intrepid lives simultaneously — from a lost and starving rōnin wandering the winter forests of medieval Japan, to a contemporary disembodied wraith who interferes with radio transmissions and sends chills through anyone unlucky enough to hear him pass through the static. Scored for jazz octet, string quartet, winds, and percussion, and recorded live in Los Angeles and Austin, the album moves through noir, ritual, dislocation, beauty, absurdity, and dream-logic, with poetic intersections that invoke Jack Kerouac and Yamanoue no Okura. It is music for listeners drawn to the worlds of Frank Zappa, Charles Ives, Ralph Towner, Maurice Ravel, Bill Evans, John Zorn, and John Abercrombie — or to any music that refuses to stay in one century, one genre, or one body.

His one-man-band project, Madrigals for Mongrels, is a cutting-edge rock project that fuses genre-twisting textures with incendiary social commentary. Equal parts art-rock provocation, cinematic songcraft, and guitar-driven sonic architecture, the project gives Bryan a visceral creative vehicle for songs that confront power, hypocrisy, spiritual dissonance, alienation, absurdity, and the strange theater of modern life. With multiple singles out and a full vinyl release slated for early 2027, Madrigals for Mongrels represents one of Bryan’s most direct and uncompromising artistic statements.

Bryan was an in-house producer at the legendary Blackbird Studio in Nashville for eight and a half years and served on faculty at The Blackbird Academy and the University of New Haven, where he taught audio production, engineering, and publishing. He has also served on faculty at Belmont University and Vanderbilt University, teaching electroacoustic composition, sound design, jazz guitar, contemporary music production, and the history of American song.

As Co-Founder of Modern Music Masters, Bryan helps lead an industry-leading online music education platform featuring multiple Grammy-winning faculty, including Jerry Douglas, Paul Franklin, and Viktor Krauss. His educational work reflects his long-standing belief that musicianship, recording, creativity, and technology are deeply connected.

Bryan is also the co-host of The Earworm Podcast, a platform devoted to deep musical conversation, creative process, recording culture, songwriting, production, and the hidden architecture of the music that stays with us. The podcast extends Bryan’s lifelong work as a composer and musician into a format designed for musicians, producers, songwriters, and music aficionados.

In addition, Bryan is the founder of Briarwave, an audio plugin and hardware design company focused on boutique tools for musicians, producers, engineers, and sonic experimenters. Drawing on decades of experience with rare studio equipment, classic recording techniques, sound design, and modern production workflows, Briarwave creates expressive audio tools with a distinctly personal, artisanal point of view.

Bryan is a featured monthly columnist for Premier Guitar Magazine, where his Recording Dojo column explores recording, production, sound design, guitar tones, and musicianship. His work has also been spotlighted in Guitar Player, Flatpicking Guitar, Vintage Guitar, Billboard, and Mix Magazine.

Professional Affiliations:

NARAS / Grammy
Leadership Music
AES / Audio Engineering Society
IBMA / International Bluegrass Music Association