Earl Rudolph "Bud" Powell was an American jazz pianist and composer. A pioneer in the development of bebop, jazz critics have commented that his compositions and playing style "greatly extended the range of jazz harmony," and his application of complex bebop phrasing to the piano influenced both his contemporaries and later pianists including Walter Davis, Jr., Toshiko Akiyoshi, and Barry Harris.
John Leslie "Wes" Montgomery was an American jazz guitarist. Montgomery was known for his unusual technique of plucking the strings with the side of his thumb, and for his extensive use of octaves, which gave him a distinctive sound.
Toshiko Akiyoshi is an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and bandleader.
St. Elmo Sylvester Hope was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger, chiefly in the bebop and hard bop genres. He grew up playing and listening to jazz and classical music with Bud Powell, and both were close friends of another influential pianist, Thelonious Monk.
David Liebman is an American saxophonist, flautist and jazz educator. He is known for his innovative lines and use of atonality. He was a frequent collaborator with pianist Richie Beirach.
Fred Hersch is an American jazz pianist, composer, educator and HIV/AIDS activist. He was the first person to play weeklong engagements as a solo pianist at the Village Vanguard in New York City. He has recorded more than 70 of his jazz compositions. Hersch has been nominated for several Grammy Awards, and, as of December 2014, had been on the Jazz Studies faculty of the New England Conservatory since 1980.
Bradford Alexander Mehldau is an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger.
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.
Robert Broom Jr. is an American jazz guitarist, composer, and educator. He was born and raised in New York City, then moved to Chicago, which has been his home town since 1984. He performs and records with The Bobby Broom Trio and his organ group, The Bobby Broom Organi-Sation. While versed in the traditional jazz idioms, Broom draws from a variety of American music forms, such as funk, soul, R&B, and blues.
John Mars is a Canadian singer, songwriter, and percussionist.
J. D. Considine is an American music critic who has been writing about music professionally since 1977.
Ann Southam, was a Canadian electronic and classical music composer and music teacher. She is known for her minimalist, iterative, and lyrical style, for her long-term collaborations with dance choreographers and performers, for her large body of work, and, according to the Globe and Mail, for "blazing a trail for women composers in a notoriously sexist field".
Paul Paul Haines was an American poet and jazz lyricist. Born in Vassar, Michigan, Haines eventually settled in Canada after spending time in Europe, Asia, and the United States; he had a long stint as a French teacher at Fenelon Falls Secondary School, in Ontario, Canada. Active in New York City in the 60s, he recorded Albert Ayler's Ghosts. A second recording made by Ayler called Spiritual Unity (1965) included a printed folio with text by Paul Haines called "You and the Night and Music."
John Serry Jr. is an American jazz pianist and composer, as well as a composer of contemporary classical music works that feature percussion, on which he also doubles. He is a son of the accordionist and composer John Serry. His debut solo album was 'Exhibition', for which he received a Grammy Nomination for his composition, 'Sabotage'.
William Ernest Smith is a Canadian writer, editor, record producer, saxophonist, and clarinetist of English birth. He has served as the editor of CODA magazine since 1976, and is a co-founder of Sackville Records, a Canadian record label that specialized in jazz.
Dana Reason is a Canadian composer, recording artist, keyboardist, producer, arranger, and sound artist working at the intersections of contemporary musical genres and intermedia practices.
Brian Landrus is a jazz saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer, and educator.
Robert Stuart Hamilton, CM, Hon. LL.D, A.R.C.T. was an award-winning Canadian accompanist, vocal coach, and opera producer based in Toronto. He was a well-known advocate of post-Baroque French opera. He was recognized nationally for his work as the longtime quiz master for CBC Radio’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, he taught opera repertoire and diction at the University of Toronto.
Steve Masakowski is an American jazz guitarist, educator, and inventor. He invented the guitar-based keytar and the switch pick, and has designed three custom-built seven-string guitars. He developed an approach to playing the guitar by using his pick design, allowing him to switch from fingerpicking to flatpicking.
Nick Sanders is an American jazz pianist and composer, as well as the leader of the eponymously named Nick Sanders Trio. He has recorded three studio albums for Sunnyside Records: Nameless Neighbors (2013) and You Are a Creature (2015), with his trio band including bassist Henry Fraser and drummer Connor Baker, and Janus (2016), a duo album with saxophonist Logan Strosahl.
