David Warren Brubeck was an American jazz pianist and composer, considered one of the foremost exponents of cool jazz. Many of his compositions have become jazz standards including "In Your Own Sweet Way" and "The Duke". Brubeck's style ranged from refined to bombastic, reflecting both his mother's classical training and his own improvisational skills. His music is known for employing unusual time signatures as well as superimposing contrasting rhythms, meters, and tonalities.
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".
Roscoe Mitchell is an American composer, jazz instrumentalist, and educator, known for being "a technically superb – if idiosyncratic – saxophonist". The Penguin Guide to Jazz described him as "one of the key figures" in avant-garde jazz; All About Jazz stated in 2004 that he had been "at the forefront of modern music" for more than 35 years. Critic Jon Pareles in The New York Times has mentioned that Mitchell "qualifies as an iconoclast". In addition to his own work as a bandleader, Mitchell is known for cofounding the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).
Myra Melford is an American avant-garde jazz pianist and composer. A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, Melford was described by the San Francisco Chronicle as an "explosive player, a virtuoso who shocks and soothes, and who can make the piano stand up and do things it doesn't seem to have been designed for."
Jason Moran is an American jazz pianist, composer, and educator involved in multimedia art and theatrical installations.
Matana Roberts is an American sound experimentalist, visual artist, jazz saxophonist and clarinetist, composer and improviser based in New York City. She has previously been an active member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).
The music festival emerged in England in the 18th century as an extension of urban concert life into a form of seasonal cultural festivity structured around a schedule of music performances or concerts. It is generally an annually occurring event with more regular and extensive programming than more spontaneous or improvised forms of music festivity. Music festivals are generally organized by individuals or organizations within networks of music production, typically music scenes, the music industries, or institutions of music education. The music festival is the largest and one of the most important performance institutions in music life, a place for experiencing where the culture is at.
Ken Field is a saxophonist, flautist, percussionist, and composer. Since 1988 he has been a member of the electrified modern music ensemble Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, with whom he has recorded eight CDs.
Helen Sung is an American jazz pianist.
Rob Mazurek is an American composer, cornetist, improviser and visual artist living in Chicago, Illinois.
Clarice Assad is a Brazilian-American composer, pianist, arranger, and singer from Rio de Janeiro. She is influenced by popular Brazilian culture, Romanticism, world music, and jazz. She comes from a musical family, which includes her father, guitarist Sergio Assad, her uncle, guitarist Odair Assad, and her aunt, singer-songwriter Badi Assad.
Alvin Leroy Fielder Jr was an American jazz drummer. He was a charter member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Black Arts Music Society, Improvisational Arts band, and was a founding faculty member of the Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp.
Karl E. H. Seigfried is a German–American jazz, rock, and classical bassist, guitarist, composer, bandleader, writer and educator based in Chicago.
A jam band is a musical group whose live albums and concerts relate to a fan culture that began in the 1960s with the Grateful Dead, who held lengthy improvisational "jams" during their concerts. These include extended musical improvisation over rhythmic grooves and chord patterns, and long sets of music which often cross genre boundaries.
Tomeka Reid is an American composer, improviser, cellist, curator, and teacher.
Mike Reed is an American jazz drummer, bandleader, composer and music presenter.
Gabe Noel is an American musician, composer, arranger, and sound designer currently residing in Los Angeles.
Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi is a studio album by American jazz musician Vijay Iyer. It was released on November 7, 2014 under ECM Records as a soundtrack for Prashant Bhargava's experimental documentary film Radhe Radhe. The album was commissioned by Emil Kang, Executive Director of the Carolina Performing Arts as part of a wider series of works to celebrate the centenary of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913).
OHMME is a rock band from Chicago, which singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist duo Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart formed in 2014. Since 2016, Matt Carroll has been OHMME's drummer.
Peter Margasak is a music critic, journalist, and artistic director of the annual Frequency Festival in Chicago, an event that grew out of his longstanding work programming the weekly Frequency Series for experimental, improvised, and contemporary classical music. Margasak wrote for the Chicago Reader for 25 years.