Weather Report was an American jazz fusion band active from 1970 to 1986. The band was founded in 1970 by Austrian keyboardist Joe Zawinul, American saxophonist Wayne Shorter, Czech bassist Miroslav Vitouš, American drummer Alphonse Mouzon as well as American percussionists Don Alias and Barbara Burton. The band was initially co-led by co-frontmen Zawinul and Shorter but, subsequently as the 1970s progressed, Zawinul largely became the sole musical leader of the group. Other prominent members at various points in the band's lifespan included Jaco Pastorius, Alphonso Johnson, Victor Bailey, Chester Thompson, Peter Erskine, Airto Moreira, and Alex Acuña. Throughout most of its existence, the band was a quintet consisting of Zawinul, Shorter, a bass guitarist, a drummer, and a percussionist.
Roger Lee Reynolds is an American composer. He is known for his capacity to integrate diverse ideas and resources, and for the seamless blending of traditional musical sounds with those newly enabled by technology. Beyond composition, his contributions to musical life include mentorship, algorithmic design, engagement with psychoacoustics, writing books and articles, and festival organization.
The Louisville Orchestra is the primary orchestra in Louisville, Kentucky. It was founded in 1937 by Robert Whitney (1904–1986) and Charles R. Farnsley, Mayor of Louisville. The Louisville Orchestra employs salaried musicians, and offers a wide variety of concert series to the community, including classical programs featuring international guest artists, pops performances, and education and family concerts. In 1942 the orchestra adopted the name of the former Louisville Philharmonic Society, which it kept until 1977 before reverting to its original name. The orchestra is the resident performing group for the Louisville Ballet and the Kentucky Opera, and presents several concerts across the Kentucky/Indiana area.
Michael Gordon is an American composer and co-founder of the Bang on a Can music collective and festival. He grew up in Nicaragua.
Tyondai Adaien Braxton is an American composer and musician. He has been composing and performing music under his own name and collaboratively under various group titles and collectives since the mid-1990s, including in the experimental rock group Battles from its formation in 2002 until his departure from the group in 2010.
Daniel Deacon is an American composer and electronic musician based in Baltimore, Maryland.
Stephen Rowley Montague is an American composer, pianist and conductor who grew up in Idaho, New Mexico, West Virginia and Florida.
Craig Marvin Taborn is an American pianist, organist, keyboardist and composer. He works solo and in bands, mostly playing various forms of jazz. He started playing piano and Moog synthesizer as an adolescent and was influenced at an early stage by a wide range of music, including by the freedom expressed in recordings of free jazz and contemporary classical music.
Andrea Molino is an Italian composer and conductor.
Anna Kepe, also known by her married name of Anna Kepe Haas, is a director, actress, producer, pedagogue and entrepreneur. Kepe received her MFA from The Shakespeare Theatre, Academy for Classical Acting in Washington, D.C. under the direction of Michael Kahn.
Laurence Kaptain is an American symphonic cimbalom artist. He is dean of the College of Arts & Media University of Colorado Denver and has served as Dean of the Louisiana State University College of Music & Dramatic Arts, where he was a faculty member in the School of Music. Until 2009, he served as dean of Shenandoah Conservatory in Winchester, Virginia. From 2004 to 2006 he was director of the Schwob School of Music at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia.
John Kennedy is an American conductor and composer.
Ben Sollee is an American cellist, singer-songwriter, and composer known for his political activism. His music incorporates banjo, guitar, and mandolin along with percussion and unusual cello techniques. His songs exhibit a mix of folk, bluegrass, jazz, and R&B elements. Sollee has also composed longer instrumental pieces for dance ensembles and for film. Sollee revealed on Twitter that, in the fall of 2020, he contracted COVID-19. The following year, he tweeted that, as a result, he now suffers from long covid.
Robert Paterson is an American composer of contemporary classical music, as well as a conductor and percussionist. His catalog includes over 100 compositions. He has been called a "modern day master" and is primarily known for his colorful orchestral works, large body of chamber music and clear vocal writing in his operas, choral works, vocal chamber works and song cycles.
Peter Jarvis is an American percussionist, drummer, conductor, composer, music copyist, print music editor and college professor.
David Greilsammer is a pianist and conductor.
Leon Milo is an American composer, percussionist and sound artist.
Jan Williams is a percussionist, arts administrator, teacher, conductor, and composer who has championed avant-garde and progressive music in the United States. He is recognized as an important proponent of percussion performance and its literature.
Michael Waldrop is an American drummer, percussionist, composer and music educator. He is notable as a virtuoso percussionist in both jazz and classical idioms; with equal focus on drumset and keyboard percussion (marimba/vibraphone). Since 2014 he has been a recording artist for Origin Records.
Aurelio de la Vega was a Cuban-American composer, lecturer, essayist, and poet. He wrote numerous works in many forms and media and, from the early 1960s, was an active force on the United States musical scene. Many of his compositions are published and recorded, and the majority of them are played constantly nationally and internationally. His music and aesthetic ideas have been commented upon and analyzed in books, newspapers and reviews throughout the United States and Latin America. In 1978 he was awarded the coveted Friedheim Award of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C., and was nominated four times for a Latin Grammy Award.
