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.
Richard Quentin Laird was an Irish musician, best known as the bassist and a founding member of the jazz fusion band Mahavishnu Orchestra, with which he performed from 1971 to 1973.
John McLaughlin, also known as Mahavishnu, is an English guitarist, bandleader, and composer. A pioneer of jazz fusion, his music combines elements of jazz with rock, world music, Western classical music, flamenco, and blues. After contributing to several key British groups of the early 1960s, McLaughlin made Extrapolation, his first album as a bandleader, in 1969. He then moved to the U.S., where he played with drummer Tony Williams's group Lifetime and then with Miles Davis on his electric jazz fusion albums In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, Live-Evil, and On the Corner. His 1970s electric band, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, performed a technically virtuosic and complex style of music that fused electric jazz and rock with Indian influences.
The Mahavishnu Orchestra was a jazz fusion band formed in New York City in 1971, led by English guitarist John McLaughlin. The group underwent several line-up changes throughout its history across its two periods of activity, from 1971 to 1976 and from 1984 to 1987. With its first line-up consisting of musicians Billy Cobham, Jan Hammer, Jerry Goodman, and Rick Laird, the band received its initial acclaim for its complex, intense music consisting of a blend of Indian classical music, jazz, and psychedelic rock as well as its dynamic live performances between 1971 and 1973. Many members of the band have gone on to acclaimed careers of their own in the jazz and jazz fusion genres.
Olga Neuwirth is an Austrian contemporary classical composer, visual artist and author. She gained fame mainly through her operas and music theater works, which often deal with topical and decidedly political themes of identity, violence and intolerance.
Andreas Paolo Perger is a contemporary Austrian guitarist, improviser, and composer of German-Polish and Austrian-Italian descent. His music, autobiographical in nature, draws from variety of traditional and contemporary influences, such as contemporary jazz, new music, improvised music, and electronic music. Perger uses a variable and open concept of guitar playing, improvising, and composing. He plays the 5.1 Surround Guitar and the classical concert guitar.
Hall Franklin Overton was an American composer, jazz pianist and music teacher.
Joseph Horovitz was an Austrian-born British composer and conductor best known for his 1970 pop cantata Captain Noah and his Floating Zoo, which achieved widespread popularity in schools. Horovitz also composed music for television, including the theme music for the Thames Television series Rumpole of the Bailey, and was a prolific composer of ballet, orchestral, brass band, wind band and chamber music. He considered his fifth string quartet (1969) to be his best work.
Michael Mantler is an Austrian avant-garde jazz trumpeter and composer of contemporary music.
Renaud Garcia-Fons is a French bassist and composer.
Huw Thomas Watkins is a British composer and pianist. Born in South Wales, he studied piano and composition at Chetham's School of Music in Manchester, where he received piano lessons from Peter Lawson. He then went on to read music at King's College, Cambridge, where he studied composition with Robin Holloway and Alexander Goehr, and completed an MMus in composition at the Royal College of Music, where he studied with Julian Anderson. Huw Watkins was awarded the Constant and Kit Lambert Junior Fellowship at the Royal College of Music, where he used to teach composition. He is currently Honorary Research Fellow at the Royal College of Music.
Thomas Larcher is an Austrian composer and pianist.
Quartet San Francisco is a non-traditional and eclectic string quartet led by violinist Jeremy Cohen. The group played their first concert in 2001 and has recorded five albums. Playing a wide range of music genres including jazz, blues, tango, swing, funk, and pop, the group challenges the traditional classical music foundation of the string quartet.
Maria Baptist is a German musician and professor.
In the 1970s in jazz, jazz became increasingly influenced by Latin jazz, combining rhythms from African and Latin American countries, often played on instruments such as conga, timbale, güiro, and claves, with jazz and classical harmonies played on typical jazz instruments. Artists such as Chick Corea, John McLaughlin and Al Di Meola increasingly influenced the genre with jazz fusion, a hybrid form of jazz-rock fusion which was developed by combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments, and the highly amplified stage sound of rock musicians such as Jimi Hendrix. All Music Guide states that "..until around 1967, the worlds of jazz and rock were nearly completely separate." However, "...as rock became more creative and its musicianship improved, and as some in the jazz world became bored with hard bop and did not want to play strictly avant-garde music, the two different idioms began to trade ideas and occasionally combine forces." On June 16, 1972 the New York Jazz Museum opened in New York City at 125 West 55th Street in a one and one-half story building. It became the most important institution for jazz in the world with a 25,000 item archive, free concerts, exhibits, film programs, etc.
Petr Kotik is a composer, conductor and flutist living in New York City. He was educated in Europe. From 1960 to 1963, Kotik studied composition privately with Jan Rychlík in Prague, and from 1963 to 1966 at the Music Academy in Vienna with Karl Schieske, Hans Jelinek, and Friedrich Cerha. In Prague, he founded and directed Musica Viva Pragensis (1961–64) and the QUAX Ensemble (1966–69). He came to the United States in 1969 at the invitation of Lukas Foss and Lejaren Hiller to join the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the University at Buffalo.
David Sulzer is an American neuroscientist and musician. He is a professor at Columbia University Medical Center in the departments of psychiatry, neurology, and pharmacology. Sulzer's laboratory investigates the interaction between the synapses of the cerebral cortex and the basal ganglia, including the dopamine system, in habit formation, planning, decision making, and diseases of the system. His lab has developed the first means to optically measure neurotransmission, and has introduced new hypotheses of neurodegeneration in Parkinson's disease, and changes in synapses that produce autism and habit learning.
Gregor Huebner is a violinist, pianist and composer. He performs solo and with several ensembles including El Violin Latino, Sirius Quartet, Berta Epple and Salsafuerte. From 1985 to 2012 he was a member of Tango Five. He is a professor of composition at the University for Music and Theater in Munich, Germany. In 2017 he received the Grand Prize for New York Philharmonic's New World Initiative Composition Challenge for his composition “New World, Nov 9. 2016.”
Karen Asatrian is an Armenian jazz pianist and a composer. His music is a synthesis of contemporary jazz and Armenian folk music. The recent album "Noor" with Karen Asatrian and Armenian Spirit band is composed of Armenian traditional songs rearranged with a contemporary jazz style.
Michael Radanovics is an Austrian violinist and composer.
