The rich and varied music of Sudan has traditional, rural, northeastern African roots and also shows Arabic, Western or other African influences, especially on the popular urban music from the early 20th century onwards. Since the establishment of big cities like Khartoum as melting pots for people of diverse backgrounds, their cultural heritage and tastes have shaped numerous forms of modern popular music. In the globalized world of today, the creation and consumption of music through satellite TV or on the Internet is a driving force for cultural change in Sudan, popular with local audiences as well as with Sudanese living abroad.
Mary Lou Williams was an American jazz pianist, arranger, and composer. She wrote hundreds of compositions and arrangements and recorded more than one hundred records. Williams wrote and arranged for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, and she was friend, mentor, and teacher to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie.
Dee Dee Bridgewater is an American jazz singer and actress. She is a three-time Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, as well as a Tony Award-winning stage actress. For 23 years, she was the host of National Public Radio's syndicated radio show JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater. She is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Geri Antoinette Allen was an American jazz pianist, composer, and educator. She taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Pittsburgh.
Errollyn Wallen is a Belize-born British composer.
The National Youth Jazz Orchestra (NYJO) is a British jazz orchestra founded in 1965 by Bill Ashton. In 2010. Mark Armstrong took over as Music Director of the flagship performing band, and Artistic Director of the organisation; Bill Ashton became Life President, and Nigel Tully became Executive Chair. In July 2021, Susy York Skinner became the Chief Executive.
Sarah Frances Beamish is a British composer and violist. Her works include chamber, vocal, choral and orchestral music. She has also worked in the field of music, theatre, film and television, as well as composing for children and for her local community.
Renaud Garcia-Fons is a French bassist and composer.
Eleanor Deanne Therese Alberga is a Jamaican contemporary music composer who lives and works in the United Kingdom. Her most recent compositions include two Violin Concertos, a Trumpet Concerto and a Symphony.
Sarah Kirkland Snider is an American composer. She has received critical acclaim for her chamber, orchestral, song cycle, choral, and ballet works.
Women in jazz have contributed throughout the many eras of jazz history, both as performers and as composers, songwriters and bandleaders. While women such as Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald were famous for their jazz singing, women have achieved much less recognition for their contributions as composers, bandleaders and instrumental performers. Other notable jazz women include piano player Lil Hardin Armstrong and jazz songwriters Irene Higginbotham and Dorothy Fields.
Carolyn Leonhart is a jazz singer, daughter of jazz bassist Jay Leonhart and sister of the trumpeter Michael Leonhart. She has performed as a back-up vocalist for Steely Dan on several tours and recordings.
Valerie Coleman is an American composer and flutist as well as the creator of the wind quintet Imani Winds. Coleman is a distinguished artist of the century who was named Performance Today's 2020 Classical Woman of the year and was listed as “one of the Top 35 Women Composers” in the Washington Post. In 2019, Coleman's orchestral work, Umoja, Anthem for Unity, was commissioned and premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Coleman's Umoja is the first classical work by a living African American woman that the Philadelphia Orchestra has performed.
Tomorrow's Warriors (TW) is a jazz music education and artist development organisation that was co-founded in 1991 by Janine Irons and Gary Crosby, committed to championing diversity, inclusion and equality across the arts through jazz, with a special focus on "Black musicians, female musicians and those whose financial or other circumstances might lock them out of opportunities to pursue a career in the music industry". Crosby drew inspiration from having been a member of the Jazz Warriors, a London-based group of musicians that in the 1980s showcased many young Black British musicians who went on to achieve international success.
Almost Persuaded is the tenth studio album released by jazz/pop duo Swing Out Sister. It was produced by band member Andy Connell. It is the culmination of "Moveable Feast", a PledgeMusic project that had been running for several years. In 2015, the band had released Rushes, an in-progress version of the album. Almost Persuaded was released via direct MP3 download in November 2017 and then via autographed CD to those had pledged to the project in December 2017. The album was released on 22 June 2018.
Nubya Nyasha Garcia is an English jazz musician, saxophonist, composer and bandleader.
Ash Walker is a London-based musician, multi-instrumentalist and DJ, whose music spans a diverse range of genres, such as jazz, blues, soul, funk, reggae, dub, trip hop, acid jazz, and electronica, among others. He has released four studio albums: Augmented 7th (2015) and Echo Chamber (2017) on Deep Heads, and Aquamarine (2019) and Astronaut on Night Time Stories.
Christine Jensen is a composer, conductor, and saxophonist based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She was awarded the Juno Award for Contemporary Jazz Album of the Year for her albums Habitat (2014) and Treelines (2011). She is the sister of trumpeter Ingrid Jensen.
Zodiac Suite is a series of 12 pieces of jazz music written by the American jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams and first performed in 1945. The suite makes use of elements of classical music alongside jazz, and Williams was influenced by modernism when writing and arranging it. Each song in the suite is inspired by an astrological sign and musicians or performers who were born under it. Williams began writing music for Zodiac Suite in 1942 and finished the composition in 1945.
Polyhymnia is the third studio album by British-Bahraini musician Yazz Ahmed. It was released on 11 October 2019 through Ropeadope Records.
