A musical ensemble, also known as a music group or musical group, is a group of people who perform instrumental and/or vocal music, with the ensemble typically known by a distinct name. Some music ensembles consist solely of instrumentalists, such as the jazz quartet or the orchestra. Other music ensembles consist solely of singers, such as choirs and doo-wop groups. In both popular music and classical music, there are ensembles in which both instrumentalists and singers perform, such as the rock band or the Baroque chamber group for basso continuo and one or more singers. In classical music, trios or quartets either blend the sounds of musical instrument families or group instruments from the same instrument family, such as string ensembles or wind ensembles. Some ensembles blend the sounds of a variety of instrument families, such as the orchestra, which uses a string section, brass instruments, woodwinds, and percussion instruments, or the concert band, which uses brass, woodwinds, and percussion.
Bertram Jay Turetzky is a contemporary American double bass (contrabass) soloist, composer, teacher, and author of The Contemporary Contrabass, a book that looked at a number of new and interesting ways of playing the double bass including featuring it as a solo performance vehicle with no other instrumental accompaniment.
Tim Berne is an American avant-garde jazz saxophonist and record label owner. His primary instruments are the alto and baritone saxophones.
Walter Sinclair Hartley was an American composer of contemporary classical music.
J. D. Parran is an American multi-woodwind player, educator, and composer specializing in jazz and free improvisation. He plays the soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, and bass saxophone, as well as the E-flat clarinet, alto clarinet, bass clarinet, contra-alto clarinet, piccolo, alto flute, bamboo flute, Native American flute, bamboo saxophone, and nagaswaram.
Alex Cline is an American jazz drummer.
Sam Newsome is an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and educator. His music combines straight-ahead jazz, world music and experimental jazz, which uses extended techniques. Newsome is an associate professor of music and the coordinator of the music program at Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus.
Ken Filiano is an American jazz and orchestral bassist based in Brooklyn, New York.
Nine Winds is an American jazz record label that was founded in 1977 by Vinny Golia.
Wayne Edward Peet is an American jazz pianist and organist, active chiefly on the West Coast jazz scene.
Ira John Rapson, III was an American jazz trombonist and educator.
Hugh Ragin is an American jazz trumpeter.
Walter Thompson is a composer, pianist, saxophonist, percussionist, and educator. He created the multidisciplinary live composing sign language, Soundpainting.
Rich Halley is an American jazz tenor saxophonist and composer. He has released 24 recordings as a leader. As Down Beat described him: “Oregon-based saxophonist Rich Halley has been turning out smart brawny music for a couple of decades”. All About Jazz called his music “a sublime balance of the cerebral and visceral”.
Gavin Templeton is an American modern jazz saxophonist, composer and bandleader, called "a pivotal force in the L.A. progressive jazz scene."
Prataksis is a collaborative studio album by the jazz trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, the multi-instrumentalist Vinny Golia, and the double bass player Bertram Turetzky. The album was released in 1997 by Golia's Nine Winds Records.
Steuart Liebig, born July 25, 1956, is an American bassist and composer of modern creative jazz and the free improvisational music. He plays 6-string bass guitars.
Jeff Kaiser is an American trumpet player and composer who teaches music technology and music composition at the University of Central Missouri. As a trumpet player, he has performed and recorded with Vinny Golia's Large Ensemble, Eugene Chadbourne, The Motor Totemist Guild, and Guerino Mazzola, and played on the soundtrack for the HBO TV series Deadwood. As a composer and performer, Kaiser's recording on Nine Winds Records, Nothing is Not Breath, has been referred to on AllMusic as "one of the best presentations of Southern California improvising talent ever recorded, indicating his superior talents as a bandleader and conductor.” Performances of his experimental big band, The Jeff Kaiser Ockodektet, have been included among the top jazz concerts in San Diego.
The Alchemical Mass/Suite Solutio is a live album by The Jeff Kaiser Ockodektet with The Ojai Camerata, and The Kaiser/Diaz-Infante Sextet, released in 2004 by pfMENTUM.
Stephanie "Steph" Richards is a Canadian-American composer, trumpeter, bandleader and producer known for her contributions to the contemporary jazz and experimental music scenes. Her multidisciplinary approaches to composition, including her Supersense project for scent and music with Jason Moran, Kenny Wollesen and Stomu Takeishi, have earned critical acclaim. In 2014 Richards was appointed to the music faculty at the University of California, San Diego.
