Brian Newman Once Had to Sell His Flugelhorn to Pay Rent. Now He’s Lady Gaga’s Bandleader (Exclusive)

Brian Newman’s desire to be a musician started at band camp.

“I took a jazz camp. I was goofing off in concert band, I was improvising even though I didn’t know what that was. I was playing what was not on the page and playing along with the band and just playing,” the trumpeter tells PEOPLE. “And then I kept getting in trouble.”

The band director encouraged Newman to take his jazz course over the summer and “that was it.” “Ever since that jazz course, I’ve always wanted to be a New York City musician,” he tells PEOPLE over a Zoom call from his garage in Brooklyn, waiting for his car to get reupholstered in the shop.

Newman began playing trumpet when he was 10 years old, influenced by Chet Baker and Miles Davis, emulating their sound and hustling from then. “I booked a lot of my own gigs, coffee houses in the beginning and then started playing at an Italian restaurant three nights a week with musicians older than me and just kept learning.”

He attended the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music but dropped out to move to New York (Newman is currently finishing his degree there, a full-circle moment).

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“I moved to New York around 2003 and walked around the city in a suit in July trying to get a waiter job or any job known to man,” he recalls.

“And I knew I had to get a job, so I just walked around the city. I finally got a job at this place called Agave in the West Village. Started working there and hanging out at the jazz clubs down around Christopher Street at nighttime after the set and kept going and worked about eight years, six or seven years — every other job known to man, busboy, back waiter, bartender, moving company, film car driver.”

Newman did everything he could just to remain in New York, taking gigs off of Craigslist and booking his own shows. A formative moment for him was playing at Duane Park in downtown Manhattan, packing the venue for music and burlesque shows. The time spent there led to gigs at the Plaza Hotel’s Oak Room and the Rose Bar at the Gramercy Hotel.

With these gigs came Newman’s knack for production. “I built the programming and the rooms for The Django and the Roxy Hotel. So that kind of kicked me off going into a production, creative director kind of role,” he said.

Other creative endeavors include opening a jazz club for Jon Batiste in The Bahamas at Baha Mar and serving as the musical director for Bruno Mars’ club at the Pinky Ring at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. He and his wife, burlesque performer Angie Pontani, also do shows together.

Newman’s residency at the Flatiron Room — which wraps up on June 7 but will pick back up again in the fall — came to be with the help of Tommy Tardie, who opened the venue in 2012.

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Tardie told Newman about the venue, and the two “always had the same idea about what New York nightlife should be,” along with the “old school supper club vibes of days gone by.”

“That’s not always done. Or if it’s not done, it’s not done correctly. Tommy just had the right vibe with that. The stage is great, the sound people are great, the sound system is great, the food is great, the drinks.”

Adds Newman, “Tommy was coming to those places. We ended up starting to play there, and I try to bring the energy.”

Newman, 43, is focused on the music and the vibe at his shows at the Flatiron Room as he honors the Great American Songbook. It’s about “making people forget about their BS going on in their lives from day to day for at least a couple of hours.”

“The thing I love about The Flatiron Room is just that we can really stretch there. We can, of course, we’re entertaining and we’re making sure the crowd is having a great time, but it is a great place for me to try new things. It’s a great place to break in new music, to invite people down to see us,” he says.

“You can come and have a drink at the bar. You can make reservations at the tables, you can have dinner, you can not have dinner. We play from 9:00 to midnight, so you can show up at 11:30 and catch the last half of the last set and have a cocktail and some dessert.”

“That’s the coolest thing to me about the joint that I love being there. I’d rather be there on a Saturday night than anywhere else.”

Among Newman’s impressive accolades is serving as Lady Gaga’s bandleader for her jazz projects, including her Jazz & Piano concerts in Las Vegas, Cheek to Cheek and Love for Sale with the late Tony Bennett, and Harlequin, the companion album for Joker: Folie à Deux.

He co-produced Gaga’s Grammy-winning cover of “La Vie En Rose,” which is featured in A Star Is Born. Fans may also recognize his name from Gaga’s shoutout to him in “Just Another Day” from Joanne.

Newman met Gaga, 39, when he was a bartender and she was a go-go dancer on the Lower East Side. She always had “a bigger-than-life kind of vibe.” His first impression was that the 14-time Grammy winner “was a hard worker and a fun person to be around. She’s always been like that.”

As for Bennett, who died in 2023 at 96 years old, “he was a force to be around. Always just humble and down to earth and kind to us in the band as well as the people around him.”

Newman knows he is “extremely lucky” for breaking into the New York music scene — and not without hard work.

“Everybody has this story where you move to New York, you’re broke, you’re paying rent, you’re trying to scrape by,” he recalls. “I remember selling my flugelhorn, one of my trumpets just to make rent because there was no money coming from home.”

“I wanted to make it by myself. I wanted to do it on my own in New York, like Frank [Sinatra] said, ‘You can make it here…’ I know it’s cliché, but really you can make it anywhere.”

Up next for Newman — aside from his return to the Flatiron Room this fall — are After Dark shows at the Box with his wife, performances at Cafe Carlyle, and recording a duo record with holiday music and love songs.