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• 
  

• 
  Germany
  Germany (ⁱ/ˈdʒɜrməni/), officially the Federal Republic of Germany (German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, pronounced [ˈbʊndəsʁepuˌbliːk ˈdɔʏtʃlant] ( listen)), is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km² and has a largely temperate seasonal climate. With 81.8 million inhabitants, it is the most populous member state and the largest economy in the European Union. It is one of the major political powers of the European continent and a technological leader in many fields.
  A region named Germania, inhabited by several Germanic peoples, was documented before AD 100. During the Migration Period, the Germanic tribes expanded southward, and established successor kingdoms throughout much of Europe. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation while southern and western parts remained dominated by Roman Catholic denominations, with the two factions clashing in the Thirty Years' War, marking the beginning of the Catholic–Protestant divide that has characterized German society ever since. Occupied during the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of Pan-Germanism inside the German Confederation resulted in the unification of most of the German states into the German Empire in 1871 which was Prussian dominated. After the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the subsequent military surrender in World War I, the Empire was replaced by the Weimar Republic in 1918, and partitioned in the Treaty of Versailles. Amidst the Great Depression, the Third Reich was proclaimed in 1933. The latter period was marked by Fascism and World War II. After 1945, Germany was divided by allied occupation, and evolved into two states, East Germany and West Germany. In 1990 Germany was reunified.
  
  wn.com/Germany
• 
  New York
  New York (/njuː ˈjɔrk/; locally IPA: [nɪu ˈjɔək] or [nuː ˈjɔɹk] ( listen)) is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. New York is the 27th most extensive, the 3rd most populous, and the 7th most densely populated of the 50 United States. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east. The state has a maritime border with Rhode Island east of Long Island, as well as an international border with the Canadian provinces of Ontario to the west and north, and Quebec to the north. The state of New York is often referred to as New York State to distinguish it from New York City.
  New York City, with a population of over 8.1 million, is the most populous city in the United States. Alone, it makes up over 40 percent of the population of New York state. It is known for its status as a center for finance and culture and for its status as the largest gateway for immigration to the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, New York City is also a destination of choice for many foreign visitors. Both the state and city were named for the 17th century Duke of York, James Stuart, future James II and VII of England and Scotland.
  
  wn.com/New_York
• 
  New York City
  New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. The city is referred to as New York City or The City of New York to distinguish it from the State of New York, of which it is a part. As a global power city, New York exerts a significant impact upon commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and entertainment. The home of the United Nations Headquarters, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has been described as the cultural capital of the world.
  Located on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, each of which comprises a state county. The five boroughs—The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island—were consolidated into a single city in 1898. With a Census-estimated 2011 population of 8,244,910 distributed over a land area of just 305 square miles (790 km²), New York is the most densely populated major city in the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. The New York City Metropolitan Area's population is the United States' largest, with 18.9 million people distributed over 6,720 square miles (17,400 km²), and is also part of the most populous combined statistical area in the United States, containing 22.1 million people as of the 2010 Census.
  
  wn.com/New_York_City
• 
  United States
  The United States of America (commonly abbreviated to the United States, the U.S., the USA, America, and the States) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west, across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.
  At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km²) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2011 GDP of $15.1 trillion (22% of nominal global GDP and over 19% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity). Per capita income is the world's sixth-highest.
  
  wn.com/United_States

• 
  Andy Sheppard
  Andy Sheppard (born 20 January 1957) is a British jazz saxophonist and composer. He has been awarded several prizes at the British Jazz Awards, and has worked with some notable figures in contemporary jazz, including Gil Evans, Carla Bley, George Russell and Steve Swallow.
  Sheppard was born in Warminster, Wiltshire, England, in 1957. At the age of 19 he emerged as a musician in the Salisbury-based contemporary quartet Sphere in the late 1970s, gigging only three weeks after picking up the saxophone. He honed his skills in the wine bars and jazz clubs of the UK and Europe in the early 1980s. He also played with world music groups and with more established improvisers such as Keith Tippett. While still with Sphere, Sheppard moved to Paris, working with French bands Lumière and Urban Sax.
  In the mid-1980s Sheppard returned to the UK, playing often on Ki Longfellow-Stanshall's and Vivian Stanshall's Bristol, England-based Old Profanity Showboat, and released his self-titled debut solo album, featuring Randy Brecker and Steve Swallow, who also produced the album. The record was well received and led to Sheppard being awarded the Best Newcomer prize at the 1987 British Jazz Awards, followed by the Best Instrumentalist Award in 1988. '87 also saw Sheppard join George Russell's Living Time Orchestra and tour with Gil Evans.
  
  wn.com/Andy_Sheppard
• 
  Anton Fier
  Anton Fier, (born June 20, 1956), is an American drummer, composer and bandleader. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio.
  Fier was an early member of The Lounge Lizards and The Feelies. He was in The Lodge (with John Greaves), worked with Pere Ubu, was briefly in the Voidoids and founded The Golden Palominos. The 1978 Pere Ubu EP titled "Datapanik in the Year Zero" was dedicated to Fier.
  Fier has collaborated extensively with Bill Laswell and also toured and recorded with Hüsker Dü guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Bob Mould.
  Fier also played with bassist Jack Bruce and guitarist Kenji Suzuki on the 1987 album Inazuma Super Session - "Absolute Live!!"
  Fier played in the band Locus Solus with John Zorn and Arto Lindsay. They recorded a live album for Zorn's 50th birthday celebration: 50th Birthday Celebration Volume 3 of the 50th birthday series on Tzadik.
  
  wn.com/Anton_Fier
• 
  Art Farmer
  Arthur Stewart "Art" Farmer (August 21, 1928, Council Bluffs, Iowa – October 4, 1999) was an American jazz trumpeter and flugelhorn player. He also played flumpet, a trumpet/flugelhorn combination designed for him by David Monette. His identical twin brother, Addison Farmer (d. 1963), was a bassist.
  The son of a steelworker, Art Farmer worked as a musician from the mid-1940s onwards. Based in Los Angeles, he played in the bands of Benny Carter and Jay McShann among others.
  He joined Lionel Hampton's orchestra around 1953, sharing the trumpet chairs within the organization with Clifford Brown and Quincy Jones. Having relocated to New York, he subsequently worked with Gigi Gryce, Horace Silver and Gerry Mulligan among others. From the middle of the 1950s, Farmer featured in recordings by leading arrangers of the day, including George Russell, Jones and Oliver Nelson. Significantly, he formed "The Jazztet" with the composer and tenor saxophonist Benny Golson, both men having independently come to the conclusion that the other should be a member of their group. "The Jazztet" lasted until 1962, and assisting in the early careers of pianist McCoy Tyner and trombonist Grachan Moncur III, with the group recording several albums for Argo and Mercury Records. In the early 1960s Farmer established a trio with guitarist Jim Hall and bassist Steve Swallow. Later, with drummer Pete La Roca and pianist Steve Kuhn, Farmer and Swallow recorded the album Sing Me Softly of the Blues (1965) for the Atlantic label.
  
  wn.com/Art_Farmer
• Attila Zoller
  Attila Cornelius Zoller (June 13, 1927 – January 25, 1998) was a Hungarian born Jazz guitarist. He won Deutscher Filmpreis for Beste Filmmusik (best score) in Germany for the film Das Brot der frühen Jahre in 1962.
  Born in Visegrád, Hungary, as a child Zoller was taught classical violin by his father, who was a professional violinist. In his teens, he switched to flugelhorn, then bass, and finally guitar. Zoller quit school during the Russian occupation of Hungary following World War II and began playing professionally in Budapest jazz clubs. He escaped Hungary in 1948 just before the permanent Soviet blockade of the country and began his serious music career after he moved to Vienna in 1948. He formed a jazz group with the accordionist and vibraphonist Vera Auer. Zoller left Austria for Germany in 1954, where he played with pianist Jutta Hipp, saxophonist Hans Koller and trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff. Visiting American musicians Oscar Pettiford and Lee Konitz found Zoller's work notable and they urged him to move to the US which he did in 1959, after winning a scholarship to the Lenox School of Jazz. There he studied with Jim Hall and roomed with Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, whose influence sparked Zoller's interest in free jazz.
  
  wn.com/Attila_Zoller
• Ben Sidran
  Ben Sidran (born August 14, 1943) is an American jazz and rock pianist, organist, vocalist and writer born in Chicago, noted for his work with the early Steve Miller Band.
  Sidran was raised in Racine, Wisconsin, and attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1961, where he became a member of The Ardells along with Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs. When Miller and Scaggs left Wisconsin for the West Coast and stardom, Sidran stayed behind to earn a degree in English literature. After graduating in 1966, Sidran enrolled in the University of Sussex, England, to pursue a PhD degree in American Studies.
  Sidran rejoined Miller in an English recording studio the next year, playing on the album "Children of the Future." While in England, he was a session musician for artists that included Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones, Peter Frampton and Charlie Watts. After a brief stint in Los Angeles, where he began his career as a recording artist (teamed with Scaggs and drummer Jim Keltner) and record producer, Sidran returned to Madison in 1971 and has kept the university town as a home-base ever since, playing often with such Madison-based talents as drummer Clyde Stubblefield and keyboardist-composer Leo Sidran, Sidran's son. Over the years, while continuing to travel, perform and produce, he taught courses at the University (on the business of music) and, beginning in 1981, hosted a variety of jazz programs for NPR, (including the Peabody Award Winning "Jazz Alive" series) and for VH1 television (where his "New Visions" series in the early 90s won the Ace Award.)
  
  wn.com/Ben_Sidran
• Bobby Naughton
  Robert "Bobby" Naughton (b. June 25, 1944) is an American jazz vibraphonist.
  Naughton was born in Boston; he played piano from age seven. In the 1960s he played piano in rock and lounge outfits before a stint in the Army, where he played organ. Following his discharge he attended arts school and studied painting.
  In 1966, he began playing vibraphone, and before the end of the decade played with Perry Robinson, and Sheila Jordan. He began releasing material on his own label, Otic Records, in 1969. He assisted filmmaker Hans Richter, writing the score to the silent film Everyday, which he had filmed in 1929. In 1972 he played in the Jazz Composers Orchestra, and from 1973 until the beginning of the 1980s he played with Wadada Leo Smith. From 1978 to 1982 he toured with Anthony Braxton in the Creative Music Orchestra.
  With Anthony Braxton
  With Wadada Leo Smith
  
  wn.com/Bobby_Naughton
• 
  Carla Bley
  Carla Bley, née Borg (born May 11, 1936), is an American jazz composer, pianist, organist and band leader. An important figure in the free jazz movement of the 1960s, she is perhaps best known for her jazz opera Escalator Over The Hill (released as a triple LP set), as well as a book of compositions that have been performed by many other artists, including Gary Burton, Jimmy Giuffre, George Russell, Art Farmer and her ex-husband Paul Bley.
  Bley was born in Oakland, California. Her father, a piano teacher and church choirmaster, encouraged her to sing and to learn to play the piano. After giving up the church to immerse herself in roller skating at the age of fourteen, she moved to New York at seventeen and became a cigarette girl at Birdland, where she met jazz pianist Paul Bley, whom she married in 1957. He encouraged her to start composing. The couple later divorced.
  A number of musicians began to record her compositions: George Russell recorded "Bent Eagle" on his 1960 release Stratusphunk in 1960; Jimmy Giuffre recorded "Ictus" on his album Thesis; and Paul Bley's Barrage consisted entirely of her compositions.
  
  wn.com/Carla_Bley
• 
  Charlie Haden
  Charles Edward Haden (born August 6, 1937) is an American jazz musician. He is a double bassist, probably best known for his long association with saxophonist Ornette Coleman. Haden is also known for his signature lyrical bass lines.
  Haden was born in Shenandoah, Iowa, and raised in a musical family, which often performed together on the radio playing country music and American folk songs. Haden made his professional debut as a singer when he was two years old, and continued singing with his family until he contracted a mild form of polio when he was 15. The polio damaged his throat muscles and vocal cords, and as a result, Haden was unable to control his pitch while singing. A few years before contracting polio, Haden had become interested in jazz, and began playing his older brother's double bass. Eventually he set his sights on Los Angeles, and to save money for the trip took a job as house bassist for ABC-TV's Ozark Jubilee in Springfield, Missouri.
  Haden moved to Los Angeles in 1957. His first recordings were made that year with Paul Bley. He began recording with Ornette Coleman shortly after, including the important The Shape of Jazz to Come. Haden's folk-influenced style complemented the microtonal, Texas blues elements of Coleman. Haden would enter Keith Jarrett's trio and his 'American Quartet' from 1967 to 1976 with Paul Motian and Dewey Redman. He also played in the collective Old and New Dreams.
  
  wn.com/Charlie_Haden
• 
  Cindy Blackman
  Cindy Blackman , sometimes known as Cindy Blackman-Santana (born November 18, 1959) is an American jazz and rock drummer. Blackman is best known for recording and touring with Lenny Kravitz. Blackman has recorded several straight-ahead jazz albums under her own name, and has performed with acclaimed jazz and rock artists, including Pharoah Sanders, Ron Carter, Sam Rivers, Cassandra Wilson, Angela Bofill, Buckethead, Bill Laswell and Joe Henderson. Tony Williams is her main drumming influence. In 1997 she recorded Multiplicity as a drum teaching video. "To me, jazz is the highest form of music that you can play because of the creative requirements," says Blackman. Blackman is the wife of rock guitarist Carlos Santana.
  Born November 18, 1959 in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Blackman comes from a musical family, both her mother and grandmother were classical musicians and her uncle a vibist. "My mom, when she was younger, played violin in classical orchestras, and her mom, incidentally, was a classical musician. My mom used to take me to see classical concerts," says Blackman. "My dad was into jazz -- Miles Davis, Ahmad Jamal, people like that." Blackman's first introduction to the drums happened when she was seven years old in her hometown of Yellow Springs, Ohio and attending a pool party at a friend's house, she went to use the bathroom and saw a drum set and just hopped onto the set. "It was incredible," says Blackman. "Just looking at them struck something in my core, and it was completely right from the second I saw them," says Blackman. "And then, when I hit them, it was like, wow, that’s me. That’s completely natural for me. It’s like breathing for me. It didn’t feel awkward at all."
  
  wn.com/Cindy_Blackman
• Clifford Thornton
  Clifford Thornton (September 6, 1939 - November 25, 1989) was an American free jazz trumpeter and trombonist. Born in Philadelphia in 1939, he studied with trumpeter Donald Byrd in the mid-1950s and worked with various players such as tuba player Ray Draper. After a stint in the army, Thornton moved to New York City. He played with numerous avant-garde jazz bands, appearing as a sideman on records by notable artists such as Sun Ra and Sam Rivers. His first album, 1967's Freedom & Unity, was recorded the day after John Coltrane's funeral, and marked the first recorded appearance of Joe McPhee. Possessing radical political leanings, Thornton was denied entry into France in 1970. Thornton spent the last 15 years of his life in Europe, and died in Geneva, Switzerland in 1989.
  With Dave Burrell
  With Archie Shepp
  
  wn.com/Clifford_Thornton
• Don Ellis
  Don Ellis (July 25, 1934 - December 17, 1978) was an American jazz trumpeter, drummer, composer and bandleader. He is best known for his extensive musical experimentation, particularly in the area of unusual time signatures. Later in his life he worked as a film composer, among other works contributing a score to 1971's The French Connection and 1973's The Seven-Ups.
  Ellis was born in Los Angeles, CA on July 25, 1934. His father was a Methodist minister and his mother a church organist. He attended West High School in Minneapolis, MN. It was after seeing a Tommy Dorsey Big Band concert that he first became interested in jazz. Other early inspirations were Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. He graduated from Boston University in 1956 with a composition degree.
  Ellis' first job was with the Glenn Miller band, directed by Ray McKinley. He stayed with the band until September, 1956, when he joined the Seventh Army Symphony and Soldiers' Show Company. He was sent to Frankfurt, Germany. In the Army band, Ellis met pianist Cedar Walton, and saxophonists Eddie Harris and Don Menza. It was also in this band that Ellis got his first opportunity to write for a big band.
  
  wn.com/Don_Ellis
• 
  Don Preston
  Donald Ward Preston (born September 21, 1932 in Flint, Michigan), also known as Dom DeWilde or Biff Debrie, is an American jazz and rock and roll musician.
  Preston was born into a family of musicians and began studying music at an early age. His father was the composer-in-residence for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
  Preston later did a stint in the army, serving in Trieste, Italy. Upon his return to Detroit during the early '50s, Preston associated with pianist Tommy Flanagan. He also sat in with Elvin Jones and others at the city's West End Cafe where Yusef Lateef conducted twice-a-week jam sessions with Milt Jackson's brother, bassist Ollie Jackson.
  Preston moved to Los Angeles in 1957 where he hooked up with pianist Paul Bley, bassist Charlie Haden, and others who were hearing jazz in new ways.
  Many will recognize Preston from his long collaboration with Frank Zappa as the keyboardist and one of the members of the original Mothers of Invention. Preston performed and recorded with Zappa until 1974. During that time he was music director for Meredith Monk and started recording and performing electronic music.
  
  wn.com/Don_Preston
• 
  Eberhard Weber
  Eberhard Weber (born January 22, 1940 in Stuttgart, Germany) is a German double bassist and composer. As a bass player, Weber is known for his highly distinctive tone and phrasing. Weber's compositions blend chamber jazz, European classical music, minimalism and ambient music, and are regarded as characteristic examples of the ECM Records sound.
  He began recording in the early 1960s, and released his first record, The Colours of Chloë (ECM 1042), as a leader under his own name in 1973. In addition to his career as a musician, he also worked for many years as a television and theater director. He has designed an electric-acoustic bass featuring an extra C-string.
  His music, often in a melancholic tone, follows simple ground patterns (frequently ostinatos), yet is highly organized in its colouring and attention to dramatic detail.
  Weber was a notable early proponent of the solid-body electric double bass, which he has played regularly since the beginning of the 1970s.
  From the early 1960s to the early 1970s, his closest musical association was with pianist Wolfgang Dauner. Their many mutual projects were very diverse, from mainstream jazz to jazz-rock fusion to avant-garde sound experiments. During this period he also played and recorded with (among many others) pianists Hampton Hawes and Mal Waldron, guitarists Baden Powell de Aquino and Joe Pass, The Mike Gibbs Orchestra and violinist Stephane Grappelli.
  
  wn.com/Eberhard_Weber
• Emanuele Arciuli
  Emanuele Arciuli (born in Galatone on June 26, 1965) is an Italian classical pianist.
  He received his diploma from the Conservatory in Bari. After graduation, he continued his piano studies with Vincenzo Vitale, Paolo Bordoni and Leon Fleisher, and attended master classes with Gyorgy Sandor, Michel Dalberto and Maurizio Pollini. He gave numerous recitals in prestigious Italian concert houses such as Teatro San Carlo (Naples), Teatro La Fenice (Venice) and Teatro Carlo Felice (Genova). He won numerous awards and is regularly invited to festivals throughout Europe and the U.S.
  His repertoire comprises Classical Music and the Second Viennese School; his discography includes the complete piano works of Alban Berg and Anton Webern. After his American début 1998 in Cincinnati, Arciuli dedicated much work to a fruitful collaboration with contemporary American composers and musicians. In 2002 he premièred at the Miller Theatre at New York Columbia University Round Midnight Variations, a collection of variations on the famous Thelonious Monk theme, composed for him by major American musicians (Babbitt, Bolcom, Crumb, Daugherty, Harbison, Kernis, Rzewski, Torke and others).
  
  wn.com/Emanuele_Arciuli
• 
  Enrico Rava
  Enrico Rava (born 20 August 1939 in Trieste, Italy), is a prolific jazz trumpeter and arguably one of the best known Italian jazz musicians. He originally played trombone, changing to the trumpet after hearing Miles Davis. His first commercial work was as a member of Gato Barbieri's Italian quintet in the mid-1960s; in the late 1960s he was a member of Steve Lacy's group. In 1967 Rava moved to New York City, and one month later became a member of the group Gas Mask, a group that had one LP on Tonsil Records in 1970. He has played with artists such as Carla Bley, Jeanne Lee, Paul Motian, Lee Konitz and Roswell Rudd. Chiefly an exponent of bebop jazz, Enrico Rava has also played successfully in avant-garde settings. His style may partly recall Kenny Wheeler's in its spareness and lightness of tone, albeit Rava's is harmonically simpler.
  In the 1970s and 1980s he worked with Pat Metheny, Michel Petrucciani, John Abercrombie, Joe Henderson, Richard Galliano, Miroslav Vitouš, Andrea Centazzo, Joe Lovano, Gil Evans and Cecil Taylor.
  
  wn.com/Enrico_Rava
• 
  Federico Fellini
  Federico Fellini (Italian pronunciation: [fedeˈriːko felˈliːni]; January 20, 1920 – October 31, 1993) was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century, and is widely revered. He won five Academy Awards and was nominated for 12 in a career that spanned over forty years.
  Fellini was born on January 20, 1920 to middle-class parents in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea. His father, Urbano Fellini (1894–1956), born to a family of Romagnol peasants and small landholders from Gambettola, moved to Rome in 1915 as a baker apprenticed to the Pantanella pasta factory. His mother, Ida Barbiani (1896–1984), came from a bourgeois Catholic family of Roman merchants. Despite her family’s vehement disapproval, she eloped with Urbano in 1917 to live at his parents' home in Gambettola. A civil marriage followed in 1918 with the religious ceremony held at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome a year later. The couple settled in Rimini where Urbano became a traveling salesman and wholesale vendor. Fellini had two siblings: Riccardo (1921–1991), a documentary director for RAI Television, and Maria Maddalena (m. Fabbri; 1929–2002).
  
  wn.com/Federico_Fellini
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  Gary Burton
  Gary Burton (born January 23, 1943, Anderson, Indiana) is an American jazz vibraphonist.
  A true original on the vibraphone, Burton developed a pianistic style of four-mallet technique as an alternative to the prevailing two-mallet technique. This approach caused Burton to be heralded as an innovator and his sound and technique are widely imitated. He is also known for pioneering fusion jazz and popularizing the duet format in jazz, as well as being a major figure in jazz education due to his 30 years at the Berklee College of Music.
  Beginning music at six years old, Burton for the most part taught himself to play marimba and vibraphone. He also began studying piano at age sixteen as he finished high school in Princeton, Indiana (56-60). Burton has cited jazz pianist Bill Evans as a main inspiration for his approach toward the vibraphone.
  Burton attended Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1960-61. He studied with Herb Pomeroy and soon befriended the composer and arranger Michael Gibbs. After establishing his career during the 1960s, he returned to join the staff of Berklee from 1971–2004, serving first as Professor, then Dean and finally as Executive Vice President during his last decade at the college.
  
  wn.com/Gary_Burton
• Gary Windo
  Gary Windo (November 7, 1941, Brighton – July 25, 1992, New York City) was a jazz tenor saxophonist.
  He came from a musical family in England and by age six took up drums and accordion, then guitar at 12, and finally saxophone at 17. He lived in the United States in the 1960s, but returned to England in 1969. In the early 1970s, his career grew as he founded his own group, the Gary Windo Quartet, and worked with Brotherhood of Breath, Centipede, Matching Mole, The Running Man, Carla Bley and Nick Mason.
  He also did work outside with groups like The Psychedelic Furs, Robert Wyatt and NRBQ. In addition to this he did incidental music for Saturday Night Live and also taught.
  Windo suffered from asthma. He died in 1992 and since then compilation albums of his work continue to appear with a recent example being Anglo-American.
  
  wn.com/Gary_Windo
• Grachan Moncur III
  Grachan Moncur III (born June 3, 1937) is an American jazz trombonist who has mostly played free jazz, as well as being a prolific composer. He is the son of jazz bassist Grachan Moncur II and the nephew of jazz saxophonist Al Cooper.
  Born in New York City and raised in Newark, New Jersey, Moncur began playing the cello at age nine, and switched to the trombone at eleven. In high school he attended the Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina, the private school where Dizzy Gillespie had studied. While still in school he began sitting in with touring jazz musicians on their way through town, such as Art Blakey and Jackie McLean, with whom he formed a lasting friendship.
  After high school he toured with Ray Charles (1959–1962), Art Farmer's and Benny Golson's Jazztet (1962), and Sonny Rollins. He took part in two classic Jackie McLean albums in the early 1960s, One Step Beyond and Destination Out, to which he also contributed the bulk of compositions and which led to two influential albums of his own for Blue Note Records, Evolution (1963) with Jackie McLean and Lee Morgan, and Some Other Stuff (1964) with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter.
  
  wn.com/Grachan_Moncur_III
• Hal Willner
  Hal Willner (born 1957, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American music producer working in recording, films, TV and live events. He is best known for assembling tribute albums and events featuring a wide variety of artists and musical styles (jazz, classical, rock, Tin Pan Alley). His first tribute album was Amarcord Nino Rota in 1981.
  In the late 1970s he worked under record producer Joel Dorn, credited as Associate Producer on Leon Redbone's albums Double Time and Champagne Charlie, and The Neville Brothers' Fiyo on the Bayou. Willner was music supervisor of Saturday Night Live from 1981–1990, occasionally returning in subsequent years. He was also a producer of the TV program Sunday Night hosted by David Sanborn.
  Willner has produced albums for Marianne Faithfull, Lou Reed, Bill Frisell, William S. Burroughs, Gavin Friday, Lucinda Williams, Laurie Anderson and Allen Ginsberg, among others. He produced a live tribute concert to Tim Buckley, that ultimately launched the career of Tim's son Jeff. He has released one album under his own name: Whoops, I'm an Indian, which featured audio samples from 78 rpm records from the early-mid 20th century.
  
  wn.com/Hal_Willner
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  Howard Tate
  Howard Tate (August 13, 1939 – December 2, 2011) was an American soul singer and songwriter.
  He moved with his family to Philadelphia in the early 1940s. In his teens, he joined a gospel music group that included Garnet Mimms and, as the Gainors, recorded rhythm and blues sides for Mercury Records and Cameo Records in the early 1960s. Tate performed with organist Bill Doggett and returned to Philadelphia.
  Mimms, leading a group called the Enchanters, introduced Tate to record-producer Jerry Ragovoy, who began recording Tate for Verve Records. Utilizing New York session musicians such as Paul Griffin, Richard Tee, Eric Gale, Chuck Rainey, and Herb Lovell, Tate and Ragovoy produced, from 1966 to 1968, a series of soul blues recordings that are regarded as some of the most sophisticated of the era.^{[by whom?]} "Ain't Nobody Home" (1966), "Look at Granny Run Run" (1966), "Baby I Love You" (1967), and "Stop" (1968) all written or co-written by Ragovoy, were well received by record buyers. "Ain't Nobody Home", "Look At Granny" and "Stop" charted in the Top 20 in the US Billboard R&B chart.
  
  wn.com/Howard_Tate
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  Jack Bruce
  John Symon Asher "Jack" Bruce (born 14 May 1943) is a Scottish musician and songwriter, respected as a founding member of the British psychedelic rock power trio, Cream, for a solo career that spans several decades, and for his participation in several well-known musical ensembles. Best recognized as a memorable vocalist and bass guitarist, Bruce has been referred to as a "World-class pioneer in his main instrument; a composer of some of the most endurable and recognisable rock songs of our time; an accomplished classical, jazz and Latin musician and one of popular music's most distinctive and evocative voices." He is also trained as a classical cellist. The Sunday Times stated "... many consider him to be one of the greatest bass players of all time."
  Bruce was born on 14 May 1943, in Bishopbriggs, East Dunbartonshire to musical parents who moved frequently, resulting in the young Bruce attending 14 different schools, ending up at Bellahouston Academy. Bruce began playing the jazz bass in his teens, and won a scholarship to study cello and musical composition at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, while playing in Jim McHarg's Scotsville Jazzband to support himself. The Academy disapproved of its students playing jazz, however. "They found out," Bruce told Musician correspondent Jim Macnie, "and said 'you either stop, or leave college.' So I left college."
  
  wn.com/Jack_Bruce
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  Jaco Pastorius
  John Francis Anthony Pastorius III (December 1, 1951 – September 21, 1987), known as Jaco Pastorius, was an American jazz musician, composer, and electric bass player.
  His playing style was noteworthy for containing intricate solos in the higher register and for the "singing" quality he achieved on the fretless bass. His innovations also included the use of harmonics. Pastorius suffered from mental illness including a substance-related disorder, and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1982. He died in 1987 at age 35 following a violent altercation at a Fort Lauderdale bar.
  Pastorius was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame in 1988, one of only six bassists to be so honored (and the only electric bass guitarist). He is one of the most influential electric bass players of all time.
  John Francis Pastorius III was born December 1, 1951 in Norristown, Pennsylvania to Jack Pastorius (big band singer and drummer) and Stephanie Katherine Haapala Pastorius, the first of their three children, Jaco Pastorius was of Finnish, German, Swedish and Irish ancestry.
  
  wn.com/Jaco_Pastorius
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  Jan Garbarek
  Jan Garbarek (born 4 March 1947) is a Norwegian tenor and soprano saxophonist, active in the jazz, classical, and world music genres. Garbarek was born in Mysen, Norway, the only child of a former Polish prisoner of war Czesław Garbarek and a Norwegian farmer's daughter. Effectively stateless until the age of seven (there was no automatic grant of citizenship in Norway at that time) Garbarek grew up in Oslo. At 21, he married Vigdis. His daughter Anja Garbarek is also a musician.
  Garbarek's sound is one of the hallmarks of the ECM Records label, which has released virtually all of his recordings. His style incorporates a sharp-edged tone, long, keening, sustained notes, and generous use of silence. He began his recording career in the late 1960s, notably featuring on recordings by the American jazz composer George Russell (such as Othello Ballet Suite and Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature). If he had initially appeared as a devotee of Albert Ayler and Peter Brötzmann, by 1973 he had turned his back on the harsh dissonances of avant-garde jazz, retaining only his tone from his previous approach. Garbarek gained wider recognition through his work with pianist Keith Jarrett's European Quartet which released the albums Belonging (1974), My Song (1977) and the live recordings Personal Mountains (1979), and Nude Ants (1979). He was also a featured soloist on Jarrett's orchestral works Luminessence (1974) and Arbour Zena (1975)
  
  wn.com/Jan_Garbarek
• Jimmy Giuffre
  James Peter Giuffre (April 26, 1921 – April 24, 2008) was an American jazz clarinet and saxophone player, composer and arranger. He is notable for his development of forms of jazz which allowed for free interplay between the musicians, anticipating forms of free improvisation.
  Born in Dallas, Texas, of Italian ancestry, Giuffre (pronounced "Joo-fray" in Italian, usually "Joo-free" in English) was a graduate of Dallas Technical High School and North Texas State Teachers College (University of North Texas College of Music). He first became known as an arranger for Woody Herman's big band, for which he wrote the celebrated "Four Brothers" (1947). He would continue to write creative, unusual arrangements throughout his career. He was a central figure in West coast jazz and cool jazz. He became a member of Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All Stars in 1951 as a full time All Star along with Shorty Rogers and Shelly Manne. The Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach CA became the focal point of West Coast Jazz in the 1952/1953 time period. It was during this time when he collaborated with Shorty on many of the successful charts written for the All Stars. The first recording released by the LHAS was a not so WCJ chart named Big Boy which he and Shorty had put together. It became an instant hit with the local LA community. He left the LHAS in September 1953 and was a member of Shorty Rogers and His Giants before going solo. Giuffre played clarinet, as well as tenor and baritone saxophones, but eventually focused on clarinet.
  
  wn.com/Jimmy_Giuffre
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  John Surman
  John Douglas Surman (born 30 August 1944, Tavistock, Devon) is an English jazz saxophone, bass clarinet and synthesizer player, and composer of free jazz and modal jazz, often using themes from folk music as a basis. He has also composed and performed much music for dance performances and film soundtracks.
  He initially gained recognition playing baritone saxophone in the Mike Westbrook Band in the mid-1960s. He was soon heard regularly playing soprano saxophone and bass clarinet as well. His first playing issued on a record was with the Peter Lemer Quintet in 1966. After further recordings and performances with jazz bandleaders Mike Westbrook and Graham Collier and blues-rock musician Alexis Korner, he made the first record under his own name in 1968.
  In 1969 he founded the well-regarded and influential group The Trio along with two expatriate American musicians, bassist Barre Phillips and drummer Stu Martin. In the mid-1970s he founded one of the earliest all-saxophone jazz groups, S.O.S., along with alto saxophonist Mike Osborne and tenor saxophonist Alan Skidmore. During this early period he also recorded with (among others) saxophonist Ronnie Scott, guitarist John McLaughlin, bandleader Michael Gibbs, trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, and pianist Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath.
  
  wn.com/John_Surman
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  Johnny Griffin
  John Arnold Griffin III (April 24, 1928 – July 25, 2008) was an American bop and hard bop tenor saxophonist.
  Griffin studied music at DuSable High School in Chicago under Walter Dyett, starting out on clarinet before moving on to oboe and then alto sax. While still at high school at age 15, Griffin was playing with T-Bone Walker in a band led by Walker's brother.
  Alto saxophone was still his instrument of choice when he joined Lionel Hampton's big band three days after his high school graduation, but Hampton encouraged him to take up the tenor, playing alongside Arnett Cobb. He first appeared on a Los Angeles recording with Hampton's band in 1945 at age 17.
  By mid-1947, Griffin and fellow Hampton band member Joe Morris had formed a sextet made up of local musicians, including George Freeman, where he remained for the next two years. His playing can be heard on various early Rhythm and Blues recordings for Atlantic Records. By 1951 Griffin was playing baritone saxophone in an R&B sextet led by former bandmate Arnett Cobb.
  
  wn.com/Johnny_Griffin
• Jonas Kullhammar
  Jonas Kullhammar (September 2, 1978) is a Swedish jazz composer, saxophonist and is one of Sweden's most promising jazz musicians. Since 1998 his main group has been Jonas Kullhammar Quartet, and he has participated on over 100 records as a sideman. In year 2000 he released his debut recording, the self-produced "Salut". It won him Sweden Radio's Jazz Cat award as the newcomer of the year. He also received the Django D'or award and received the price Sweden Radio's Jazz Cat as Jazz Musician of The Year in Sweden two years in a row. The group also received the award for jazz group of the year. Since then the band has toured around the world and released more cd's. Jonas is also a founding member of the groups Kullrusk and Nacka Forum. Since 2000 he runs the record label Moserobie, that releases mainly Swedish and Norwegian jazz groups.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Jonas_Kullhammar
• Karen Mantler
  Karen Mantler (born 1966) is an American jazz musician, harmonca player, singer and composer. She is the daughter of Carla Bley and Michael Mantler.
  Mantler appeared on the album Escalator Over the Hill as a child, which featured both her parents. She learned glockenspiel and was a member of her mother's band from 1977 to 1980. She studied organ and piano at the Berklee College of Music. In 1987 she formed her own ensemble for recording; she has released several discs of material, including two on ECM, since then. She toured Europe with her own band twice, and played at the Montreal International Jazz Festival. As the organist of the Carla Bley Big Band, she toured Europe again in 1992.
  
  wn.com/Karen_Mantler
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  Kurt Weill
  Kurt Julian Weill (March 2, 1900 – April 3, 1950) was a German-Jewish composer, active from the 1920s, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed productions such as his most well known work The Threepenny Opera, a Marxist critique of capitalism, which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill was a socialist^{[unreliable source?]} who held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose. He also wrote a number of works for the concert hall, as well as several Judaism-themed pieces.
  Kurt Julian Weill was born on March 2, 1900, the third of four children to Albert Weill (1867–1950) and Emma Weill née Ackermann (1872–1955). He grew up in a religious Jewish family in the "Sandvorstadt", the Jewish quarter in Dessau, Germany, where his father was a cantor. At the age of twelve, Kurt Weill started taking piano lessons and made his first attempts at writing music; his earliest preserved composition was written in 1913 and is titled Mi Addir. Jewish Wedding Song.
  
  wn.com/Kurt_Weill
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  Leo Kottke
  Leo Kottke (born 11 September 1945, Athens, Georgia, U.S.) is an acoustic guitarist. He is widely known for his innovative fingerpicking style, which draws on influences from blues, jazz, and folk music, and his syncopated, polyphonic melodies. Kottke has overcome a series of personal obstacles including partial loss of hearing and a nearly career-ending bout with tendon damage in his right hand to emerge as a widely-recognized master of his instrument.
  Focusing primarily on instrumental composition and playing, Kottke also sings sporadically, in an unconventional yet expressive baritone famously self-described as sounding like "geese farts on a muggy day". In concert, Kottke intersperses humorous and often bizarre monologues with vocal and instrumental selections from throughout his career, played solo on his signature 6- and 12-string guitars.
  Born in Athens, Georgia, Kottke moved with his parents so frequently that he was raised in twelve different states. As a youth living in Muskogee, Oklahoma, Kottke was influenced by folk and delta blues music, notably that of Mississippi John Hurt. Kottke learned to play trombone and violin before trying the guitar and developing his own unconventional picking style. A mishap with a firecracker permanently damaged the hearing in his left ear, a condition that would be exacerbated due to exposure to loud noise during firing practice while serving in the United States Navy Reserve, when his other ear also was damaged.
  
  wn.com/Leo_Kottke
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  Lew Soloff
  Lew Soloff (born February 20, 1944 in New York City) is a jazz trumpeter, composer and actor. He studied trumpet at the Eastman School of Music and the Juilliard School. He is likely best known for his work with Blood, Sweat & Tears from 1968 to 1973. Prior to this, he worked with Machito, Gil Evans, Tony Scott, and Tito Puente.
  He has also been a longtime member of the Manhattan Jazz Quintet.
  In the 1980s he was a member of Members Only, a jazz ensemble who recorded for Muse Records. He currently resides in New York City.
  Lew makes frequent guest appearances with jazz orchestras all over the world, such as the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and the Magic City Jazz Orchestra.
  With George Benson
  With Blood, Sweat & Tears
  With Carla Bley
  With Dizzy Gillespie
  With Bobby Previte
  With Jeremy Steig
  With Others
  
  wn.com/Lew_Soloff
• Michael Mantler
  Michael Mantler (born August 10, 1943) is a composer and trumpeter in new jazz and contemporary music.
  Mantler was born in Vienna, Austria. He went to the United States in 1962 to study music, and after early activities within the New York avant garde community, including work with Cecil Taylor and the Jazz Composer's Guild, he was a founder of the Jazz Composers' Orchestra Association aka JCOA, a non-profit organisation to commission, perform, and record new compositions for jazz orchestra.
  The problems of independently distributing the orchestra's record label led him to form the New Music Distribution Service (as a division of JCOA) in 1972, an organisation which was to serve many independent labels for almost twenty years.
  He then had a personal and professional relationship with Carla Bley, to whom he was married from 1967–1992, and with whom he had a daughter, Karen Mantler, now also a musician in her own right. Eventually Bley and he established their own company, WATT — a record label, recording studio, and publisher. He toured and recorded extensively with the Carla Bley Band as well as occasionally with his own live performance projects.
  
  wn.com/Michael_Mantler
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  Michel Portal
  Michel Portal (born 25 November 1935 in Bayonne, France) is a composer, saxophonist, and clarinetist.
  Portal studied clarinet at the Conservatoire de Paris. He also studied conducting with Pierre Dervaux.
  During August 1969, Portal played on several of the recordings in Stockhausen's cycle of intuitive works, Aus den sieben Tagen.
  Portal might be noted most for scoring music to film, and has won the César Award for Best Music Written for a Film three times. His first win was for the music to The Return of Martin Guerre. He plays both jazz and classical music and is considered to be one of the architects of modern European jazz.^{[citation needed]}
  In 1969, Portal co-founded the free improvisation group New Phonic Art with Vinko Globokar, Jean-Pierre Drouet and Carlos Roque Alsina.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Michel_Portal
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  Nick Mason
  Nicholas Berkeley "Nick" Mason (born 27 January 1944) is an English drummer and songwriter, best known for his work with Pink Floyd. He is the only constant member of the band since its formation in 1965. Despite solely writing only a few Pink Floyd songs, Mason has contributed to some of Pink Floyd's most popular compositions such as "Interstellar Overdrive", "A Saucerful Of Secrets" and "Echoes".
  He is the only Pink Floyd member to be featured on every one of their albums. It is estimated that as of 2010, the group have sold over 250 million records worldwide, including 74.5 million units sold in the United States.
  He also competes in auto racing events, such as the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
  The son of the documentary film maker Bill Mason, he was born in Birmingham but brought up in Hampstead, London (many online biographies mistakenly cite the street address Downshire Hill – sometimes as "the Downshire Hills" – as a district of Birmingham) and attended Frensham Heights School, near Farnham, Surrey. He later studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster), where he teamed up with Roger Waters, Bob Klose and Richard Wright in 1964 to form Pink Floyd's predecessor, Sigma 6.
  
  wn.com/Nick_Mason
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  Nino Rota
  Nino Rota (December 3, 1911, Milan – April 10, 1979, Rome) was an Italian composer and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. He also composed the music for two of Franco Zeffirelli's Shakespeare films, and for the first two films of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy, receiving for the latter the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1974.
  During his long career Rota was an extraordinarily prolific composer, especially of music for the cinema. He wrote more than 150 scores for Italian and international productions from the 1930s until his death in 1979—an average of three scores each year over a 46 year period, and in his most productive period from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s he wrote as many as ten scores every year, and sometimes more, with a remarkable thirteen film scores to his credit in 1954. Alongside this great body of film work, he composed ten operas, five ballets and dozens of other orchestral, choral and chamber works, the best known being his string concerto. He also composed the music for many theatre productions by Visconti, Zeffirelli and Eduardo de Filippo as well as maintaining a long teaching career at the Liceo Musicale in Bari, Italy, where he was the director for almost 30 years.
  
  wn.com/Nino_Rota
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  Paolo Fresu
  Paolo Fresu (born February 10, 1961) is a trumpet and flugelhorn jazz player, as well as an arranger of music, and music composer.
  Fresu was born in Berchidda, Sardinia. He picked up the trumpet at the age of 11, and played in the band Bernardo de Muro in his home town Berchidda. Fresu graduated from the Conservatory of Cagliari in 1984, in trumpet studies under Enzo Morandini, and attended the University of Musical and performing arts in Bologna.
  Fresu has taught at the Siena Jazz National Seminars, as well as jazz university courses in Terni, and is the director of Nuoro Jazz Seminars in Nuoro, Italy.
  Fresu composes music for theatre, poem, dance, radio, television, and film.
  In 2007, Fresu recorded and toured with Carla Bley's quartet, The Lost Chords.
  Award winning group Paolo Fresu Quintet has been invited to perform in SiriFort Auditorium, New Delhi.The event has been organised to celebrate 10 years of Italian Culture Centre in New Delhi.
  Paolo Fresu has played with the following bands:
  
  wn.com/Paolo_Fresu
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  Paul Bley
  Paul Bley, CM (born November 10, 1932) is a pianist known for his contributions to the free jazz movement of the 1960s as well as his innovations and influence on trio playing.
  Paul Bley was born in Montreal, Canada, his parents were Betty Marcovitch, an immigrant from Romania, and Joe Bley, owner of an embroidery factory. Bley has been a long-time resident of the United States. His music characteristically features strong senses both of melodic voicing and space.
  In the 1950s he founded the Jazz Workshop in Montreal, performing and recording there with Charlie Parker. He also performed with Lester Young and Ben Webster at that time.
  In 1953 he conducted for Charles Mingus on the Charles Mingus and his Orchestra album and the same year Mingus produced the Introducing Paul Bley album with Mingus and Art Blakey. In 1960 Bley recorded on piano with the Charles Mingus Group.
  In 1958, he hired Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins to play at the Hillcrest Club in California.
  
  wn.com/Paul_Bley
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  Paul Motian
  Stephen Paul Motian (25 March 1931 – 22 November 2011) was an American jazz drummer, percussionist and composer of Armenian extraction.
  He first came to prominence in the late 1950s in the piano trio of Bill Evans, and later led several groups. Motian played an important role in freeing jazz drummers from strict time-keeping duties.
  Motian was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. After playing guitar in his childhood, Motian began playing the drums at age 12, eventually touring New England in a swing band. During the Korean War he joined the Navy.
  Motian became a professional musician in 1954, and briefly played with pianist Thelonious Monk. He became well known as the drummer in pianist Bill Evans's trio (1959–64), initially alongside bassist Scott LaFaro and later with Chuck Israels.
  Subsequently, he played with pianists Paul Bley (1963-64) and Keith Jarrett (1967–76). Other musicians with whom Motian performed and/or recorded in the early period of his career included Lennie Tristano, Warne Marsh, Lee Konitz,Joe Castro, Arlo Guthrie (Motian performed briefly with Guthrie in 1968-69, and performed with the singer at Woodstock), Carla Bley, Charlie Haden, and Don Cherry. Motian subsequently worked with musicians such as Marilyn Crispell, Bill Frisell, Leni Stern, Joe Lovano, Alan Pasqua, Bill McHenry, Stephane Oliva, Frank Kimbrough, and many more.
  
  wn.com/Paul_Motian
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  Phil Woods
  Philip Wells Woods (born November 2, 1931) is an American jazz bebop alto saxophonist, clarinetist, bandleader and composer.
  Woods was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He studied music with Lennie Tristano, who influenced him greatly, at the Manhattan School of Music and at The Juilliard School. His friend, Joe Lopes, coached him on clarinet as there was no saxophone major at Juilliard at the time. Although he did not copy Charlie "Bird" Parker, bop's greatest saxophonist, he was known as the New Bird, a label which was also attached to other alto players such as Sonny Stitt and Cannonball Adderley at one time or another in their careers.
  After moving to France in 1968, Woods led The European Rhythm Machine, a group which tended toward avant-garde jazz. He returned to the United States in 1972 and, after an unsuccessful attempt to establish an electronic group, he formed a quintet which was still performing, with some changes of personnel, in 2004. As his theme, Woods uses a piece titled "How's Your Mama?"
  
  wn.com/Phil_Woods
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  Robert Wyatt
  Robert Wyatt (born Robert Wyatt-Ellidge, 28 January 1945, Bristol) is an English musician, and founding member of the influential Canterbury scene band Soft Machine, with a long and distinguished solo career. He is married to English painter and songwriter Alfreda Benge.
  Wyatt's mother was Honor Wyatt, a journalist with the BBC; his father, George Ellidge, was an industrial psychologist who joined the family only when Wyatt was about six. This extended family also included his half brother, actor Julian Glover, Honor Wyatt's son. Wyatt attended the Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys, Canterbury and as a teenager lived with his parents in Lydden near Dover, where he was taught the drums by visiting American jazz drummer George Neidorf.
  In 1962, Wyatt and Neidorf moved to Majorca where they stayed near the poet Robert Graves. The following year, Wyatt returned to England and joined the Daevid Allen Trio with Daevid Allen and Hugh Hopper. Allen subsequently left for France and Wyatt and Hopper formed The Wilde Flowers with Kevin Ayers, Richard Sinclair and Brian Hopper. Wyatt was initially the drummer in the Wilde Flowers, but following the departure of Ayers, he also became lead singer.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Wyatt
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  Roswell Rudd
  Roswell Rudd (born Roswell Hopkins Rudd, Jr. in Sharon, Connecticut, on November 17, 1935) is a Grammy Award-nominated American jazz trombonist and composer.
  Although skilled in a variety of genres of jazz (including dixieland, which he performed while in college) and other genres of music, he is known primarily for his work in free and avant-garde jazz. Since 1962 Rudd has worked extensively with saxophonist Archie Shepp.
  Rudd graduated from Yale University where he had played with Eli's Chosen Six, a dixieland band of Yale students that Rudd joined in the mid-'50s. The sextet played the boisterous trad jazz style of the day and recorded two albums, including one for Columbia. His landmark collaborations with Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, John Tchicai and Steve Lacy grew out of the lessons learned while playing rags and stomps for drunken college kids in Connecticut.
  Rudd later taught ethnomusicology at Bard College and the University of Maine. On and off for a period of three decades, Roswell Rudd assisted Alan Lomax with his world music song style (Cantometrics) and Global Jukebox projects, and the wealth of information on the music of this planet that he absorbed inspired him to collaborate beyond the periphery of jazz or even of western music.
  
  wn.com/Roswell_Rudd
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  Samuel Beckett
  Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in France for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.
  Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century. Strongly influenced by James Joyce, he is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd". His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career.
  Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.
  The Becketts were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland. The family home, Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court built in 1903 by Samuel's father, William. The house and garden, together with the surrounding countryside where he often went walking with his father, the nearby Leopardstown Racecourse, the Foxrock railway station and Harcourt Street station at the city terminus of the line, all feature in his prose and plays. Beckett's father was a quantity surveyor and his mother a nurse.
  
  wn.com/Samuel_Beckett
• Steve Kuhn
  Steve Kuhn (born March 24, 1938, Brooklyn, New York City) is an American jazz pianist, composer and trio leader.
  He began studying piano at the age of five and studied under Boston piano teacher Margaret Chaloff, mother of jazz baritone saxophonist Serge Chaloff, who taught him the "Russian style" of piano playing. At an early age he began improvising classical music. As a teenager he appeared in jazz clubs in the Boston area, gigging with the likes of Coleman Hawkins, Vic Dickerson, Chet Baker, and Serge Chaloff. He graduated from Harvard and attended the Lenox School of Music where he was associated with such other future jazz masters as Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Gary McFarland, with a supportive faculty that included George Russell, Gunther Schuller, the Modern Jazz Quartet members, and Bill Evans. This allowed Kuhn to play, study, and create with some of the most forward-thinking innovators of jazz improvisation and composition, culminating with his joining trumpeter Kenny Dorham's group for an extended time and (briefly) John Coltrane's quartet at New York's Jazz Gallery club.
  
  wn.com/Steve_Kuhn
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  Steve Lacy
  Steve Lacy (July 23, 1934 – June 4, 2004), born Steven Norman Lackritz in New York City, was a jazz saxophonist and composer recognized as one of the important players of soprano saxophone. Coming to prominence in the 1950s as a progressive Dixieland musician, Lacy went on to a long and prolific career. He worked extensively in experimental jazz and dabbled in free improvisation, but Lacy's music was typically melodic and tightly-structured. Lacy also became a highly distinctive composer with a signature simplicity of style, with compositions often built out of little more than a single questioning phrase, repeated several times.
  The music of Thelonious Monk became a permanent part of Lacy's repertoire after a stint in the pianist's band, with Monk's songs appearing on virtually every Lacy album and concert program; Lacy often partnered with trombonist Roswell Rudd in exploring Monk's work. Beyond Monk, Lacy performed the work of jazz composers such as Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington and Herbie Nichols; unlike many jazz musicians he rarely played standard popular or show tunes.
  
  wn.com/Steve_Lacy
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  Steve Swallow
  Steve Swallow (born October 4, 1940) is a jazz double bass and bass guitarist and composer born in Fair Lawn, New Jersey.
  One of the leading bassists in jazz, Swallow is noted for collaborations with Jimmy Giuffre, Gary Burton and Carla Bley. He was also one of the first acoustic bassists in jazz to switch entirely to electric bass guitar, on which he has a distinctively nimble sound.
  As a child, Swallow studied piano and trumpet before turning to the double bass at age 14. While attending a prep school, he began trying his hand in jazz improvisation. In 1960 he left Yale, where he was studying composition, and settled in New York City, playing at the time in Jimmy Giuffre's trio along with Paul Bley. After joining Art Farmer's quartet in 1964, Swallow began to write. It is in the 1960s that his long-term association with Gary Burton's various bands began.
  In the early 1970s, Swallow switched exclusively to bass guitar, of which he prefers the 5-string variety. Along with Monk Montgomery and Bob Cranshaw, Swallow was among the first jazz bassists to do so (with much encouragement from Roy Haynes, Swallow's favorite drummer). He plays with a pick (made of copper by Hotlicks), and his style involves intricate solos in the upper register; he was one of the early adopters of the high C string on a bass guitar.
  
  wn.com/Steve_Swallow
• 
  Thelonious Monk
  Thelonious Sphere Monk (October 10, 1917 – February 17, 1982) was an American jazz pianist and composer considered one of the giants of American music. Monk had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "Epistrophy", "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser" and "Well, You Needn't". Monk is the second most recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington, which is particularly remarkable as Ellington composed over 1,000 songs while Monk wrote about 70.
  His compositions and improvisations are full of dissonant harmonies and angular melodic twists, and are consistent with Monk's unorthodox approach to the piano, which combined a highly percussive attack with abrupt, dramatic use of silences and hesitations. This was not a style universally appreciated; poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin dismissed Monk as 'the elephant on the keyboard'.
  Monk's manner was idiosyncratic. Visually, he was renowned for his distinctive style in suits, hats and sunglasses. He was also noted for the fact that at times, while the other musicians in the band continued playing, he would stop, stand up from the keyboard and dance for a few moments before returning to the piano.
  
  wn.com/Thelonious_Monk
• 
  Whit Dickey
  Whit Dickey is a free jazz drummer. He has recorded albums as a bandleader, or with David S. Ware, Matthew Shipp and others.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Whit_Dickey
• Wikipedia Persondata
  wn.com/Wikipedia_Persondata

• Greasy Gravy
• Awful Coffee
• Appearing Nightly at the Black Orchid
• Someone to Watch
• I Hadn't Anyone Till You

• One Banana
• Two Banana
• Three Banana
• Four Banana
• Five Banana
• One Banana More
• Liver of Life
• Death of Superman / Dream Sequence #1 - Flying
• Ad Infinitum

• 3 Blind Mice
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• The Maze, Blind Mice Redux
• Hip Hip
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• Red
• Lost Chords I
• Lost Chords II
• Lost Chords III

• Blues in 12 Bars
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• Les Trois Lagons
• Baseball
• Utviklingssang

• Major
• A Dog's Life
• Satie for Two
• Lost in the Stars
• King Korn
• Playing With Water
• Musique Mecanique (Part I / Part II (At Midnight) / Part III)

• Wolfgang Tango
• Romantic Notion, No. 4
• End of Vienna
• Tigers in Training
• Romantic Notion, No. 6
• JonBenet

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• This is Here
• Like Animals
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• Stay Awake
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• Why
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• Real Life Hits
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• Light or Dark
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• Sing Me Softly of the Blues
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• Ad Infinitum
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• Lo Ultimo

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• Remember
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• Reactionary Tango - Parts 1/2/3
• Soon I will be done with the Troubles of this World

• More Brahms
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• Brooklyn Bridge
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• Pretend You're in Love
• Night-Glo
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• Els Segadors
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• Sing Me Softly of the Blues
• Dreams So Real
• Ad Infinitum
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• Song Sung Long
• Ida Lupino
• Funnybird Song
• A New Hymn

• What Will Be Left Between Us and the Moon Tonight?
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• Baseball
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• Grand Mother
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• Tijuana Traffic
• God Mother
• Old MacDonald Had a Farm

• Reactionary Tango
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• Útviklingssang
• Valse Sinistre
• Floater
• Walking Batteriewoman