Donald Phillips Project

Donald Phillips, a new name to the music industry, but surely not new to music. As a child, Donald listened to jazz artists such as Jimmy Smith, Jack McDuff, and Kenny Burrell in the 60s and 70s. At age eight, Donald Phillips had developed a passion for playing drums, but at the time his parents were unable to purchase him a drum set. As Keith Moon quoted, “I told people I was a drummer before I even had a set, I was a mental drummer”, Donald, too, as a child started playing with two wooden sticks, pots and pans, and cardboard boxes as his drum set and played until he mastered a beat following old-time favorites, Marvin Gay, Maze, Tower of Power, Average White Band, Earth,Wind & Fire, Major Lance, and many more artists of that era. Donald has also played in the Los Angeles and Hollywood areas with his family group in the 70s, “The Phillip Brothers”, which afforded them the opportunity to open for the Whispers, The Main Ingredients, and the late Rudy Ray Moore. The group was later contracted on an Original Sound label with producer, Art Laboe.

Today, Donald has mastered an original smooth jazz and fusion sound with Joey Moletti, Barry Manilow’s keyboardist, Walter Jones, bass guitarist, David Hart, Jake Langley, and Mark Speight, lead guitarists, Phil Wigfall, on the saxophone, and Wendy Kariganes, the vocalist. The sound is a layer of lite-funk rhythms, lite-funk bass, Latin genre, trumpet solo, and lite-saxophone. The music is slick, and highly polished, where the overall sound matters more than the individual parts.