Coles has also played at the North American Saxophone Alliance Regional Festival in West Virginia at the International Saxophone Symposium in Washington D.C. to premiere a commissioned work by John Hollenbeck, which he later recorded on Hollenbeck’s 2009 LP Rainbow Jimmies. Coles was invited to The Banff Workshop for Jazz and Creative music in Alberta, Canada where he was granted the distinct honor of studying with some of the great jazz pioneers such as: Tia Fuller, Somi, Vijay Iyer, Billy Hart, Mark Turner, Imani Izuri, Ingrid Jensen, Zakir Hussain, Yosvany Terry, and Miles Okazaki to name a few. In 2017 Chris was an awardee of the Knight Arts Challenge in Akron, Ohio which catapulted him to receive grant funding from GAR Foundation and the Cleveland Foundation for his multimedia tribute to the victims of the 2015 mass church shooting in South Carolina appropriately titled “Nine Lives”, which premiered in 2019. Chris is a Yamaha Performing Artist currently based out of Akron, Ohio and serves on the faculty at Oberlin Conservatory, The University of Akron and The Tri-C Creative Arts JazzFest Academy where he takes pride in bridging the gap to help the next generation of jazz giants.