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.
Joanna Clare MacGregor is a British concert pianist, conductor, composer, and festival curator. She is Head of Piano at the Royal Academy of Music and a professor of the University of London. She was artistic director of the International Summer School & Festival at Dartington Hall from 2015 to 2019.
Jon Faddis is an American jazz trumpet player, conductor, composer, and educator, renowned for both his playing and for his expertise in the field of music education. Upon his first appearance on the scene, he became known for his ability to closely mirror the sound of trumpet icon Dizzy Gillespie, who was his mentor along with pianist Stan Kenton and trumpeter Bill Catalano.
Florence Beatrice Price was an American classical composer, pianist, organist and music teacher. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price was educated at the New England Conservatory of Music, and was active in Chicago from 1927 until her death in 1953. Price is noted as the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, and the first to have a composition played by a major orchestra. Price composed over 300 works: four symphonies, four concertos, as well as choral works, art songs, chamber music and music for solo instruments. In 2009, a substantial collection of her works and papers was found in her abandoned summer home.
Grace Mary Williams was a Welsh composer, generally regarded as Wales's most notable female composer, and the first British woman to score a feature film.
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 and musician, who moved as a child with her family to London, England.
The National Youth Jazz Orchestra (NYJO), established as the London Schools' Jazz Orchestra in 1965, is a British jazz orchestra.
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.
Laurence Reginald Ward Johnson was an English composer and bandleader who wrote scores for dozens of film and television series, described as "one of the most highly regarded arrangers of big-band swing and pop music" in England. Much of Johnson's music was written for the KPM music library, for which he composed and conducted between 1960 and 1965.
Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian is a British composer, singer, and harper. She is considered one of today's leading emerging composers.
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.
Gabriel Prokofiev is a Russian-British composer, producer, DJ, and founder of the Nonclassical record label and nightclub. He has been nominated for two Ivor Novello Awards and his works have been performed internationally by orchestras such as BBC Philharmonic, St Petersburg Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Detroit Symphony, MDR Leipzig, Buenos Aires Philharmonic and Royal Seville Symphony Orchestra.
Laura Mvula is a British singer. A native of Birmingham, England, Mvula has gained experience as a young member or leader of a cappella, jazz/neo-soul and gospel groups and choirs. She was classically trained. In 2012, she signed with RCA Records and released an extended play, She, to critical acclaim.
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.
Shabaka Hutchings, also known simply as Shabaka, is a British jazz musician, composer and bandleader. He leads the band Shabaka and the Ancestors, and formerly led Sons of Kemet before its dissolution in 2022. He was also a member of The Comet Is Coming, performing under the stage name King Shabaka. Hutchings has played saxophone and other wind instruments with the Sun Ra Arkestra, Andre 3000, Floating Points, Mulatu Astatke, Polar Bear, Melt Yourself Down, Heliocentrics, London Brew and Zed-U.
Conni Ellisor is a contemporary American composer and violinist. She was trained at The Juilliard School and the University of Denver's University of Denver, Lamont School of Music, and rose to prominence as Composer-in-Residence of the Nashville Chamber Orchestra in the late 1990s. As a violinist, she has served as a member of the Denver Symphony, concertmaster of the Boulder Philharmonic, first violin in the Athena Quartet, and is now a top-call studio musician and member of the Nashville String Machine.
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 Treelines (2011) and Habitat (2014). 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.
