Julian Beck (May 31, 1925 – September 14, 1985) was an American actor, director, poet, and painter.

Beck was born in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan in New York City, the son of Mabel Lucille (née Blum), a teacher, and Irving Beck, a businessman. He briefly attended Yale University, but dropped out to pursue writing and art. He was an Abstract Expressionist painter in the 1940s, but his career turned upon meeting his future wife. In 1943, he met Judith Malina (born 1926) and quickly came to share her passion for theatre; they founded The Living Theatre in 1947.

Beck co-directed the Living Theatre until his death. The group's primary influence was Antonin Artaud, who espoused the Theatre of Cruelty, which was supposed to shock the audience out of complacency. This took different forms. In one example, from Jack Gelber's The Connection, a drama about drug addiction, actors playing junkies wandered the audience demanding money for a fix. The Living Theatre moved out of New York in 1974, after the Internal Revenue Service shut it down when Beck failed to pay $23,000 in back taxes. After a sensational trial, in which Beck and Malina represented themselves, they were found guilty by a jury.^{[citation needed]}

Beck Hansen (born Bek David Campbell, July 8, 1970) is an American musician, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, known by the stage name Beck.

The four-time platinum artist rose to underground popularity with his early works, which combined social criticism (as in "MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke Crack" and "Deep Fried Love") with musical and lyrical experimentation. He first earned wider public attention for his breakthrough single "Loser", a 1994 hit. Beck is known for creating musical collages of different styles.

Two of Beck's most popular and acclaimed recordings are Odelay (1996) and Sea Change (2002).Odelay was awarded Album of the Year by the American magazine Rolling Stone and by UK publications NME and Mojo. Odelay also received a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year. Both Odelay and Sea Change appeared on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Beck was born in Los Angeles, California, to David Campbell, a Canadian musician, and Bibbe Hansen, a visual artist and former Warhol "star". His father is of Scottish heritage and his mother is half Norwegian, a quarter Jewish and a quarter Swedish. His maternal grandfather is Al Hansen, a visual collage artist of the Fluxus school of art. Beck's paternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister. When his parents separated, Beck stayed with his mother and brother in Los Angeles, where he was influenced by the city's diverse musical offerings—everything from hip hop to Latin music and his mother's art scene—all of which would later reappear in his recorded and published work.

Judith Malina (born June 4, 1926) is a German-born American theater and film actress, writer, and director, who was one of the founders of The Living Theatre.

Malina was born in Kiel, Germany, the daughter of Jewish parents: her mother, Rosel (née Zamora), was a former actress, and her father, Max Malina, a rabbi in the Conservative denomination. In 1929 at the age of three, she immigrated with her parents to New York City. Her parents helped her see how important political theatre was, as her father was trying to warn people of the Nazi menace. Except for long tours, she has lived in New York ever since. Interested in acting from an early age, she began attending the New School for Social Research in 1945 to study theatre under Erwin Piscator. Malina was greatly influenced by Piscator's philosophy of theatre, which was based on Bertolt Brecht's principles of "epic theatre" but went further in departing from traditional narrative forms. Piscator saw theatre as a form of political communication or agitprop—Malina, unlike Piscator, was committed to nonviolence and anarchism.^{[citation needed]}

Cecil Percival Taylor (born March 25, 1929, in New York City) is an American pianist and poet. Classically trained, Taylor is generally acknowledged as one of the pioneers of free jazz. His music is characterized by an extremely energetic, physical approach, producing complex improvised sounds, frequently involving tone clusters and intricate polyrhythms. His piano technique has been likened to percussion, for example described as "eighty-eight tuned drums" (referring to the number of keys on a standard piano), and also to Art Tatum's.

Taylor began playing piano at age six and studied at the New York College of Music and New England Conservatory. After first steps in R&B and swing-styled small groups in the early 1950s, he formed his own band with soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy in 1956.

Taylor's first recording, Jazz Advance, featured Lacy and was released in 1956. It is described by Cook and Morton in the Penguin Guide to Jazz: "While there are still many nods to conventional post-bop form in this set, it already points to the freedoms which the pianist would later immerse himself in." Taylor's Quartet featuring Lacy also appeared at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival. He collaborated with saxophonist John Coltrane in 1958 (Stereo Drive, currently available as Coltrane Time).

Alan Silva (born Alan Treadwell da Silva, Bermuda, January 22, 1939) is an American free jazz double bassist and keyboard player.

Silva was born a British subject to an Azorean/Portuguese mother, Irene da Silva, and a black Bermudian father known only as "Ruby". At the very height of racial segregation in the United States, Silva emigrated to the United States at the age of five with his mother, eventually acquiring U.S. citizenship by the age of 18 or 19. He adopted the stage name of Alan Silva in his twenties.

Silva was quoted in a Bermudan newspaper in 1988 as saying that although he left the island at a young age, he always considered himself Bermudian. He was raised in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, where he first began studying the trumpet, and moved on to study the upright bass.

Silva is known as one of the most inventive bass players in jazz and has performed with many of the great names in the world of avant-garde jazz, including Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Sunny Murray, and Archie Shepp.