Mark Dresser (b. 1952 in Los Angeles) is an American double bass player and composer.

He has performed and recorded with many of the luminaries of "new" jazz composition and improvisation. For ten years he performed with the Anthony Braxton Quartet, as well as diverse groups led by Ray Anderson, Tim Berne, Anthony Davis, Gerry Hemingway, John Zorn, and others. He has made over sixty recordings.

He has received grants from New York Foundation for the Arts and Meet the Composer, as well as fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and Civitella Ranieri. He holds both B.A. and M.A. degrees in music from the University of California, San Diego where he studied contrabass with the seminal virtuoso of twentieth century performance practice, Maestro Bertram Turetzky. He was awarded a 1983 Fulbright Fellowship for advanced contrabass study with Maestro Franco Petracchi.

Dresser has been composing and performing solo contrabass and ensemble music professionally since 1972 throughout North America, Europe and the Far East. His own projects include Mark Dresser's "Force Green," and the Mark Dresser Trio, performing his music for the French Surrealist film masterpiece of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Un chien andalou as well as the German expressionist silent film classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Jen Shyu is a singer, composer, and instrumentalist. She has received several awards including a MacDowell Fellowship. She sings with the band Jade Tongue and also performs with Steve Coleman’s Five Elements.

Satoko Fujii (藤井郷子, Fujii Satoko^?, born 1958) is a Japanese avant-garde jazz pianist and composer. Fujii started playing the piano at age 4, receiving classical training until she was 20, when she became interested in improvisation and jazz.

She came to the United States in 1985, graduating from the Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1987, returning to the US in 1993, achieving a graduate diploma in Jazz Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1996. She returned to Japan with her new husband, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, leader of Gato Libre. She leads various big bands in Japan, such as Ma-do and Orchestra Tokyo.

Jim Black (born 1967 in Seattle, Washington) is a jazz drummer who has performed with Tim Berne and Dave Douglas, among others. He attended Berklee College of Music.

His own group AlasNoAxis includes Hilmar Jensson on electric guitar, Chris Speed on tenor saxophone and clarinet, and Skúli Sverrisson on electric bass. The music is in some ways closer to post-rock than jazz, concentrating on rhythmic shifts and ensemble texture rather than featured solos. Since 2000, the group has released several records on Winter & Winter.

The group Pachora, also including Black, Speed, and Sverrisson, and with Brad Shepik on tambura and electric saz, plays music that is similarly rhythmically diverse, but inspired by Balkan rhythms.

Jim participated as drummer 12 in the Boredoms 77 Boadrum performance which occurred on July 7, 2007, at the Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park in Brooklyn, New York.

He currently lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Roger Reynolds is an American composer born July 18, 1934 in Detroit, Michigan. He is a professor at the University of California at San Diego. He received an undergraduate degree in engineering physics from the University of Michigan where he later studied composition with Ross Lee Finney. Together with fellow Michigan classmates Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma, Reynolds was a founding member of the ONCE Group. After receiving his PhD, he lived abroad for seven years, first in Europe then in Japan. In the late 1960s, he returned to the United States and settled in southern California where he has been based to this day.

Roger Reynolds's works most often include text and electronic elements; he is especially a pioneer in multichannel spatial explorations. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for Whispers Out of Time, a composition for string orchestra.

He says, "I believe in as wide a range of musical involvements as is feasible given the reality of life." (Swed, 1993)