Madeleine Ertel is a trumpet player, composer, and arranger known for her honest approach to music-making. Currently splitting her work between Toronto and Berlin, she holds a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Trumpet Performance from the University of Toronto (2020) and a Masters in Jazz Composition/Arrangement from the Jazz-Institut Berlin (2026). In 2022 and 2023, Madeleine was selected as a finalist for the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Emerging Jazz Artist Award, and she was the winner of the 2023 Jazz Sudbury Emerging Jazz Artist Award.

Madeleine has studied composition with David Braid and Alexander Rapoport. Her compositions and arrangements have been premiered by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the Big Bang Ensemble as part of Toronto’s Women from Space Festival, the Jazz-Institut Berlin large ensemble, and the Shoebox Composer’s Collective - a DIY concert series she co-founded in 2023 with the goal of creating more opportunities for emerging composers to hear their work played live. In November 2021 she was accepted into the Banff Musicians in Residence program for Jazz & Creative Music to explore her innovative ideas about contemporary contrapuntal writing.

In her hometown of Kelowna, BC, Madeleine grew up playing original music around town with her sister, as well as studying classical piano and violin. Now based in Toronto, she continues to incorporate these diverse influences into her composing and improvising.

She has also become a sought-after music transcriptionist in the Toronto music community. She was commissioned to transcribe and arrange several compositions for jazz producer Jesse Markowitz’s Palladium in April 2021. In July 2021, she was hired to transcribe 15 big band arrangements for the Toronto All-Star Big Band. Since the launch of her Patreon page in spring 2021, she has hosted monthly composition analysis sessions in which she shares the scores of pieces she has transcribed and what she has learned from them, in the hopes of fostering a sense of community and knowledge-sharing within the Toronto music scene.