Gregory Agid was born in San Antonio, Texas, and grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii. He got his first clarinet at age seven, and when his family moved to New Orleans five years later, he discovered jazz. He attended the Louis Armstrong Jazz Camp, learning from Alvin Batiste, Kidd Jordan, and Clyde Kerr, then was accepted to the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA), where Batiste became his mentor. His NOCCA classmates included Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, Jon Batiste, and Christian Scott; in 2005 NOCCA awarded him a grant to study with clarinetist Eddie Daniels in Santa Fe. He earned his bachelor’s in clarinet performance from Loyola University New Orleans in 2010 and a master’s in music from the University of New Orleans in 2014, and received the ASCAP Louis Armstrong Scholarship.
Agid leads the Gregory Agid Quartet — with Joshua Starkman on guitar, Max Moran on bass, and A.J. Hall on drums — and has released three albums as a leader: Mystery Blues (2013, supervised by Delfeayo Marsalis), Words Are Not Enough (2016), and Jamz (2018), the subject of a 2018 DownBeat feature. Alongside his own band he tours the world with Michael Bublé and performs with Delfeayo Marsalis’ Uptown Jazz Orchestra. With drummer Darrian Douglas he co-founded the Second Line Arts Collective, a nonprofit mentoring young New Orleans jazz musicians in craft and the business of music, and he teaches in his own studio and at local universities.
