Steve Lacy was an American jazz saxophonist and composer recognized as one of the important players of soprano saxophone. Coming to prominence in the 1950s as a progressive dixieland musician, Lacy went on to a long and prolific career. He worked extensively in experimental jazz and to a lesser extent in free improvisation, but Lacy's music was typically melodic and tightly-structured. Lacy also became a highly distinctive composer, with compositions often built out of little more than a single questioning phrase, repeated several times.
George Lowen Coxhill known professionally as Lol Coxhill, was an English free improvising saxophonist. He played soprano and sopranino saxophone.
Steve Beresford is a British musician who graduated from the University of York He has played a variety of instruments, including piano, electronics, trumpet, euphonium, bass guitar and a wide variety of toy instruments, such as the toy piano. He has also played a wide range of music. He is probably best known for free improvisation, but has also written music for film and television and has been involved with a number of pop music groups.
George Emanuel Lewis is an American composer, performer, and scholar of experimental music. He has been a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, when he joined the organization at the age of 19. He is renowned for his work as an improvising trombonist and considered a pioneer of computer music, which he began pursuing in the late 1970s; in the 1980s he created Voyager, an improvising software he has used in interactive performances. Lewis's many honors include a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music received the American Book Award. Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music, Composition & Historical Musicology at Columbia University.
Marilyn Crispell is an American jazz pianist and composer. Scott Yanow described her as "a powerful player... who has her own way of using space... She is near the top of her field." Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote: "Hearing Marilyn Crispell play solo piano is like monitoring an active volcano... She is one of a very few pianists who rise to the challenge of free jazz." In addition to her own extensive work as a soloist or bandleader, Crispell is also known as a longtime member of saxophonist Anthony Braxton's quartet in the 1980s and '90s.
Timothy "Tim" George Hodgkinson is an English experimental music composer and performer, principally on reeds, lap steel guitar, and keyboards. He first became known as one of the core members of the British avant-rock group Henry Cow, which he formed with Fred Frith in 1968. After the demise of Henry Cow, he participated in numerous bands and projects, eventually concentrating on composing contemporary music and performing as an improviser.
Barre Phillips is an American jazz bassist. A professional musician since 1960, he moved to New York City in 1962, then to Europe in 1967. Since 1972, he has been based in southern France where, in 2014, he founded the European Improvisation Center.
Emanem Records is a record company and independent record label founded in London, England in 1974 by Martin Davidson and Madelaine Davidson to record free improvisation.
Sir John Blackwood McEwen was a Scottish classical composer and educator. He was professor of harmony and composition at the Royal Academy of Music, London, from 1898 to 1924, and principal from 1924 to 1936. He was a prolific composer, but made few efforts to bring his music to the notice of the general public.
Lindsay L. Cooper was a Scottish double bass, bass guitar and cello player. He spent four years working as a ship's musician and had performed and recorded with a number of other musicians and bands, including Michael Jackson, Boy George, Derek Bailey and Mike Oldfield.
Vijay Iyer is an American composer, pianist, bandleader, producer and writer based in New York City. The New York Times has called him a "social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway". Iyer received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. He was voted Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat magazine international critics' polls in 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2018. In 2014, he received a lifetime appointment as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University, where he was jointly appointed in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies.
Simon H. Fell was an English jazz bassist and composer; he is primarily known for his work as a free improviser and the composer of ambitiously complex post-serialist works.
Dominic Lash is a Bristol based double bassist and film theorist. He was formerly a central figure in the musicians' collective Oxford Improvisers. Important long-term musical collaborators include Angharad Davies, Bruno Guastalla, Alexander Hawkins, Tim Hill, Steve Noble, Samantha Rebello, Pat Thomas, Philipp Wachsmann and Alex Ward. He has also performed with saxophonists John Butcher and Evan Parker and violinist Tony Conrad. Recent work includes a UK tour with US guitarist Joe Morris, Australian drummer Tony Buck and saxophonist Tony Bevan. Festival appearances have included the Manchester Jazz Festival, Akbank Jazz Festival (Istanbul) and Tampere Jazz Happening.
Franz Koglmann is an Austrian jazz composer. He performs on both the trumpet and flugelhorn in most often in avant-garde jazz and third stream. An award-winning composer, Koglmann has performed or recorded with Lee Konitz, Paul Bley, Bill Dixon, Georg Gräwe, Andrea Centazzo, Theo Jörgensmann, Wolfgang Reisinger, Enrico Rava, Yitzhak Yedid, Ran Blake, and John Lindberg; together with the bassist Peter Herbert he has often musically accompanied works of the Austrian artist Heidi Harsieber.
Roger Turner is an English jazz percussionist. He plays the drumset, drums, and various percussion, and was brought up into the jazz and visual art cultures inhabited by his older brothers, playing drums from childhood in informal jazz contexts.
Fred Van Hove was a Belgian jazz musician and a pioneer of European free jazz. He was a pianist, accordionist, church organist, and carillonist, an improviser and a composer. In the 1960s and 1970s he performed with saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and drummer Han Bennink.
Dorothy Evelyn Miell is a professor of Social Psychology. Since March 2010, she has been Head of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and Vice-Principal, at the University of Edinburgh. Before moving to Edinburgh, she was Dean of Social Sciences at the Open University. Her research focuses on collaboration and communication patterns, recently in the context of creative endeavors.
Three Blokes is a live album by saxophonists Lol Coxhill, Steve Lacy and Evan Parker recorded in Berlin in 1992 and first released on the FMP label in 1994.
French Gigs is a 1983 live collaborative album of improvised experimental music by Lol Coxhill and Fred Frith. It was recorded live in France in Limoges and Poitiers in October 1978, and in Reims in 1981. The album was released on LP by AAA in 1983, on CD by AYAA in 1991, and again on CD by Klanggalerie in 2020. The 1991 release includes a new track recorded via correspondence in 1991–92 by Coxhill in London and Frith in Munich, while the 2020 release includes the extra 1991 track, plus another new track recorded in Aubervilliers, France in 1999, the last performance by Coxhill and Frith. The 2020 release was re-mastered by Myles Boison.
John Howell Morrison is a composer and professor at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While studying for his doctorate at the University of Michigan, he was a recipient of the Regents Fellowship.
