Nico Segal - Tell The Ghost Welcome Home (2023) Hi Res

The Grammy Award-winning Segal has collaborated with Frank Ocean and other artists. His first solo album, "Tell The Ghosts Welcome Home," comes out Friday.

CHICAGO — Chicago trumpeter and artist Nico Segal — formerly known as Donnie Trumpet — has created music for more than a decade with some of the biggest names: touring with Frank Ocean, collaborating with Chance the Rapper and producing for artists like J. Cole. But he’s never done a solo album — until now.

“In the theater, you feel every detail, you feel every color change, you feel every entrance and exit, you see every prop,” said Segal. “You experience the music in a different way.”

A Chicago native, Segal fell in love with music while growing up in Rogers Park, he said.

“Both of my parents are very musical. There was always music playing around the house and in car rides,” Segal, 29, said. “Music was always a part of our scenery.”

Segal’s dad taught an after-school Latin jazz band at his elementary school, which is where Segal learned to play percussion instruments like the congas and timbales. He went on to master the trumpet, the instrument that inspired his former stage name, Donnie Trumpet.

Segal played in bands and gigs around Chicago until 2009, when he helped found hip hop band Kids These Days. After the group disbanded in 2013, Segal toured with Ocean.

In 2015, Segal released “Surf” with the Social Experiment, a hip hop, neo-soul band with Chance the Rapper, Nate Fox and others. Segal later formed a duo with Fox called Intellexual, and the two collaborated on a 2019 self-titled album.

More recently, Segal has been creating music with some of his childhood friends, tapping into his love of jazz, instrumental music and improv. They call themselves The JuJu Exchange.

Over the past year, Segal has also started to explore music in a way he hasn’t before: solo.

“All these sort of checkpoints are marked by other people,” Segal said. “I was kind of prompted by the question of, ‘What would it sound like if I really just focused on my own sound?'”