Anthony Braxton is an American experimental composer, educator, music theorist, improviser and multi-instrumentalist who is best known for playing saxophones, particularly the alto. Braxton grew up on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, and was a key early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He received great acclaim for his 1969 double-LP record For Alto, the first full-length album of solo saxophone music.
Walter Hamor Piston, Jr., was an American composer of classical music, music theorist, and professor of music at Harvard University.
David Holland is an English double bassist, bass guitarist, cellist, composer and bandleader who has been performing and recording for five decades. He has lived in the United States since the early 1970s.
Barry Altschul is a free jazz and hard bop drummer who first came to notice in the late 1960s for performing with pianists Paul Bley and Chick Corea.
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.
Vinny Golia is an American composer and multi-instrumentalist specializing in woodwind instruments. He performs in the genres of contemporary music, jazz, free jazz, and free improvisation.
Tyondai Adaien Braxton is an American composer and musician. He has been composing and performing music under his own name and collaboratively under various group titles and collectives since the mid-1990s, including in the experimental rock group Battles from its formation in 2002 until his departure from the group in 2010.
Robert "Bob" Ostertag is an American musician, writer, and political activist based in San Francisco. He has published seven books, one feature film, a DVD, twenty-six albums, and collaborated with numerous musicians.
Todd Reynolds is an American violinist, composer, and conductor well known for his work with amplified violin and electronics.
Kevin Norton is an American percussionist and composer active in the New York City jazz and contemporary music scenes. He has performed and recorded with a diverse group of musicians, including Anthony Braxton, Paul Dunmall, Milt Hinton, Fred Frith, David Krakauer, Joëlle Léandre, Frode Gjerstad, Wilber Morris, James Emery, Bern Nix, and many others. In 1999, he founded Barking Hoop Recordings, a record label dedicated to releasing new and original music. Kevin Norton has also spent summers at camp Encore/Coda in Maine teaching music theory classes and private percussion classes. The label has released 11 CDs to date, which feature Norton's own groups as well as artists such as Anthony Braxton, Kevin O'Neil, Billy Stein, and the String Trio of New York.
"Yardbird Suite" is a bebop standard composed by jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker in 1946. The title combines Parker's nickname "Yardbird" and a colloquial use of the classical music term "suite". The composition uses an 32-bar AABA form. The "graceful, hip melody, became something of an anthem for beboppers."
Thurman Barker is an American jazz drummer.
Joe Fonda is an American jazz bassist.
Marcus Thompson is a violist and viola d'amore player known for his work as a recitalist, orchestral soloist, chamber musician, recording artist and educator. Thompson is a founding member and is currently artistic director of the Boston Chamber Music Society, and is Institute Professor at MIT and a faculty member at the New England Conservatory of Music.
Hugh Ragin is an American jazz trumpeter.
Phillip Sanford Wilson was an American blues and jazz drummer, a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and a member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
"Tomorrow's Another Day" is a 1935 song composed by Glenn Miller for the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra. The song was released as a 78 single by the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra on Decca Records.
François Cotinaud is a French saxophonist, clarinetist, composer, and soundpainter.
Taylor Ho Bynum is a musician, composer, educator and writer. His main instrument is the cornet, but he also plays numerous similar instruments, including flugelhorn and trumpet.
Soundpainting is a universal multi-disciplinary live-composing sign language for every kind of artist, and is still evolving since its creation in 1974 by Walter Thompson in Woodstock, New York. Soundpainting gives to the soundpainter the possibility to compose multi-disciplinary creations in real time by signing gestures to indicate the material the performers will realize and the soundpainter will shape into the composition.
