James Pugliese (born Newark, New Jersey, 1952) is an American percussionist, drummer, composer and international recording artist on over 150 CDs of experimental, jazz and rock music.
His performing experience is diverse. As a freelance percussionist he is in much demand and has performed with The New York Philharmonic Horizon Series (guest artist), New York City Ballet and soloist or performer on numerous new music and jazz festivals in Europe, Japan and the USA
Jim grew up listening to and playing soul music and rhythm and blues. He went on to study percussion with Raymond Des Roches and by the age of eighteen he had recorded the music of Edgar Varese and Charles Wuorinen for Nonsuch Records. He continued performing and or recording new music with John Cage, Lukas Foss, Kent Nagano and Philip Glass. He spent twelve years as a member of Dean Drummond’s Newband and The Harry Partch Ensemble, studying and performing microtonal music. During this same period he developed an interest in Afro-Cuban music and studied drumming and rhythm with Master Drummer Pablo Landrum.
For the last thirty years, while living in the East Village of New York City, Jim has been improvising recording and touring with many of downtown's most prominent composer/improvisers including John Zorn, Marc Ribot, Zeena Parkins, Bobby Previte and Anthony Coleman. He has recorded on over 150 CD's of new music, jazz, rock and movie soundtracks. On November 23, 1997 Avant released the first cd for his collaborative percussion trio Easside Percussion with Christine Bard and Michael Evans.
One of his latest projects "Phase III" is a continuation of his ongoing quest to combine his diverse performing experiences into a single new sound with its base in rhythm. The music skirts and shifts along the edges of free improvisation, deep groove and New Music. The music reflects Jim's vision to explore the powerful, enlightening and spiritual secrets of drumming and is inspired by his recent association and work with Nii Tettey Tetteh, master musician from Ghana, with Milford Graves, learning drumming and healing through the heartbeat and his study of the spiritual songs of the Mbira Dzavadzimu from Zimbabwe.
Jim's latest CD "Live @ Issue Project Room NYC" just won "Best New Release of 2008" in "All About Jazz NY". His other current projects include a collaborative band "IDR" with Marco Cappelli, exploring the relationship between Southern Italian Folk Music and Improvisation and his newest project “Big Easy”
John Zorn is an American composer, conductor, saxophonist, arranger and producer who "deliberately resists category". Zorn's avant-garde and experimental approaches to composition and improvisation are inclusive of jazz, rock, hardcore, classical, contemporary, surf, metal, soundtrack, ambient, and world music. In 2013, Down Beat described Zorn as "one of our most important composers" and in 2020 Rolling Stone noted "Though Zorn has operated almost entirely outside the mainstream, he's gradually asserted himself as one of the most influential musicians of our time".
Weather Report was an American jazz fusion band active from 1970 to 1986. The band was founded by Austrian keyboard player Joe Zawinul, American saxophonist Wayne Shorter and Czech bassist Miroslav Vitouš. 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.
Donald Eugene Cherry was an American jazz trumpeter. Cherry had a long association with free jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, which began in the late 1950s. He also performed alongside musicians such as John Coltrane, Charlie Haden, Sun Ra, Ed Blackwell, the New York Contemporary Five, and Albert Ayler.
Patrick Bruce Metheny is an American jazz guitarist and composer.
Masada is a musical group with rotating personnel led by American saxophonist and composer John Zorn since the early 1990s.
Ikue Mori, also known as Ikue Ile, is a drummer, electronic musician, composer, and graphic designer.
Dave Douglas is an American jazz trumpeter, composer, and educator. His career includes more than fifty recordings as a leader and more than 500 published compositions. His ensembles include the Dave Douglas Quintet; Sound Prints, a quintet co-led with saxophonist Joe Lovano; Uplift, a sextet with bassist Bill Laswell; Present Joys with pianist Uri Caine and Andrew Cyrille; High Risk, an electronic ensemble with Shigeto, Jonathan Aaron, and Ian Chang; and Engage, a sextet with Jeff Parker, Tomeka Reid, Anna Webber, Nick Dunston, and Kate Gentile.
Charles Edward Haden was an American jazz double bass player, bandleader, composer and educator whose career spanned more than 50 years. In the late 1950s, he was an original member of the ground-breaking Ornette Coleman Quartet.
The term "M-Base" is used in several ways. In the 1980s, a loose collective of young African American musicians including Steve Coleman, Graham Haynes, Cassandra Wilson, Geri Allen, Robin Eubanks, and Greg Osby emerged in Brooklyn with a new sound and specific ideas about creative expression. Using a term coined by Steve Coleman, they called these ideas "M-Base-concept" and critics have used this term to categorize this scene's music as a jazz style. But Coleman stressed "M-Base" doesn't denote a musical style but a way of thinking about creating music. As famous musicians did in the past, he also refuses the word "jazz" as a label for his music and the music tradition represented by musicians like John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, etc. However, the musicians of the M-Base movement, which also included dancers and poets, strived for common creative musical languages, so their early recordings show many similarities reflecting their common ideas, the experiences of working together, and their similar cultural background. To label this kind of music, jazz critics have established the word "M-Base" as a jazz style for lack of a better term, distorting its original meaning.
Milford Graves was an American jazz drummer, percussionist, Professor Emeritus of Music, researcher/inventor, visual artist/sculptor, gardener/herbalist, and martial artist. Graves was noteworthy for his early avant-garde contributions in the 1960s with Paul Bley, Albert Ayler, and the New York Art Quartet, and is considered to be a free jazz pioneer, liberating percussion from its timekeeping role. The composer and saxophonist John Zorn referred to Graves as "basically a 20th-century shaman."
William Winant is an American percussionist.
Susie Ibarra is a contemporary composer and percussionist who has worked and recorded with jazz, classical, world, and indigenous musicians. One of SPIN's "100 Greatest Drummers of Alternative Music," she is known for her work as a performer in avant-garde, jazz, world, and new music. As a composer, Ibarra incorporates diverse styles and the influences of Philippine Kulintang, jazz, classical, poetry, musical theater, opera, and electronic music. Ibarra remains active as a composer, performer, educator, and documentary filmmaker in the U.S., Philippines, and internationally. She is interested and involved in works that blend folkloric and indigenous tradition with avant-garde. In 2004, Ibarra began field recording indigenous Philippine music, and in 2009 she co-founded Song of the Bird King, an organization focusing on the preservation of Indigenous music and ecology.
Z'EV was an American poet, percussionist, and sound artist. After studying various world music traditions at CalArts, he began creating his own percussion sounds out of industrial materials for a variety of record labels. He is regarded as a pioneer of industrial music.
Billy Martin is an American jazz drummer, best known as a member of jazz-funk trio Medeski Martin & Wood.
Chris Brown is an American composer, pianist and electronic musician, who creates music for acoustic instruments with interactive electronics, for computer networks, and for improvising ensembles. He was active early in his career as an inventor and builder of electroacoustic instruments; he has also performed widely as an improviser and pianist with groups as "Room" and the "Glenn Spearman Double Trio." In 1986 he co-founded the pioneering computer network music ensemble "The Hub". He is also known for his recorded performances of music by Henry Cowell, Luc Ferrari, and John Zorn. He has received commissions from the Berkeley Symphony, the Rova Saxophone Quartet, the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio, the Gerbode Foundation, the Phonos Foundation and the Creative Work Fund. His recent music includes the poly-rhythm installation "Talking Drum", the "Inventions" series for computers and interactive performers, and the radio performance "Transmissions" series, with composer Guillermo Galindo.
Hamid Drake is an American jazz drummer and percussionist.
Massacre was founded in 1980 in New York City by guitarist Fred Frith, bassist Bill Laswell and drummer Fred Maher as an improvising and experimental rock band. They performed live for just over a year and recorded a studio album, Killing Time (1981). Frith and Laswell reformed Massacre in 1998 with drummer Charles Hayward, and released four more albums, Funny Valentine (1998), Meltdown (2001), Lonely Heart (2007) and Love Me Tender (2013). The last three albums were recorded live, the first in London, and the others at European festivals between 1999 and 2008.
Death Ambient is an American experimental and ambient music trio comprising Kato Hideki, Ikue Mori, and Fred Frith (guitar). The group was formed by Hideki and Mori in 1995 and recorded three albums: Death Ambient (1995) Synaesthesia (1999), Drunken Forest (2007) with guest Jim Pugliese (percussion).
The Rocksteady 7 or "David Hillyard & the Rocksteady Seven", is an American Ska and Jazz band from New York, New York that formed in 1992. Since the early 1990s the group has consisted of tenor saxophonist and band leader Dave Hillyard as well as percussionist Larry McDonald. In live performances, they are supported by a rotating cast of musicians, including drummer Eddie Ocampo and Dave Wake on keys among others.
The Sugar Factory is a 2007 collaborative album by English experimental musician Fred Frith and Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie. It comprises material drawn from improvisations by Frith and Glennie recorded during the making of the 2004 documentary film Touch the Sound about Glennie, who is profoundly deaf. The album was released in 2007 in the United States by Tzadik Records as part of their "Key Series".
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