Paul Meneghini began his auspicious career as a trumpet player with his debut performance in the St. Camillas Marching Band before an audience of more than 18,000 including President Gerald Ford for America’s bi-centennial celebration on Lexington Green and he has been trying in vain to top this lofty accomplishment ever since. Things were looking good for him as he was accepted to into the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Repertory Orchestra in 1978 at the tender age of 13 and then proceeded to find much success with many district and all state placements through high school, but as he entered college at UMASS Amherst, he was lead astray by the pursuit of the evil dollar and choose to study Mechanical Engineering. Hope was not all lost though because while at UMASS he received a Downbeat Award as well as the Fletcher Henderson Memorial Scholarship in Jazz Studies, but most importantly Paul discovered that he could actually get paid while going to bars and cocktail parties by playing the secular music of the night time. He would routinely serve his penance for these nocturnal activities by playing music in the European tradition at church for The Lord, again while being paid.
Paul relished being paid for going to parties so much that he actually abandoned his early engineering career after one year in the office so that he could recklessly pursue his lust for travel and adventure. After an extensive cruise through the Caribbean, he spend years exploring the watering holes and music halls of every big city and small town in America. Throughout this period Paul experienced many adventures with well-known musicians in many idioms. Paul is the founder and first director of the Worcester Jazz Orchestra. He has also played with the The Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, the Artie Shaw Orchestra, Ringling Brothers Circus, Boston Jazz Composers Alliance, and in Disneyland. In addition, he has worked with Max Roach, Yusef Lateef, Slide Hampton, Michael Brecker, Little Anthony, Tina Pointer, Martha Reeves, and the Elwood Blues/Dan Aykroyd character. In the classical realm, he has performed with the Orchestra on the Hill, Indian Hill Orchestra, and the New England Philharmonic,
Eventually, the lust for adventure waned and the lure of small dependents with running noses and crying voices overcame him, so Paul went to Worcester Polytechnic Institute for his Masters Degree and rebooted his long lost engineering career. Today he works as an engineer for Axcelis Technologies in Beverly, and all the crying and sniffling dependents have grown up and left him. He is very excited about playing with the Bay Colony Brass where he is confident he will finally outdo his auspicious beginnings on the trumpet.