Born in Singapore, composer, and saxophonist Caroline Davis lives in Brooklyn, New York. Herdebut album, Live Work & Play, was featured on All About Jazz’s best releases, and she was named one of JazzTimes’ Best New Artists in 2012. In 2018, she won the Downbeat Critic’s Poll “rising star” in the alto saxophone category.
She has performed improvised and composed jazz with Lee Konitz, Angelica Sanchez, Matt Mitchell, Miles Okazaki, Matt Wilson, and Billy Kaye among others. In 2019, she was a composer-in-residence at the esteemed MacDowell Colony, there to write a set of new works based on the electrical activity of neurons in the brain.
With a Ph.D. in Music Cognition from Northwestern University, Caroline brings her knowledge of music and psychology to her teaching. She has taught at Stanford Jazz Institute, Northwestern University, University of Colorado at Boulder, St. Xavier University, Columbia College, DePaul University, University of Texas at Arlington, Loyola University, Texas Tech, New Trier High School, Evanston Township High School, Denver School of the Arts, Newman Smith High School, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. She has also participated in IAJE’s Sisters in Jazz and the Kennedy Center’s Betty Carter Jazz Ahead Program.
https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/caroline-davis-guide
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Fred Lonberg-Holm is a top cellist in creative music, and active in a variety of projects in avant-garde music, experimental rock, and modern composition. He studied cello with Ardyth Alton and Orlando Cole, and composition with Morton Feldman, Anthony Braxton, and Bunita Marcus. The Delaware-born cellist spent part of his childhood in Sweden, and eventually was based out of N.Y.C. for several years, where he performed in and led various ensembles including N.Y.C. projects include his quartet PEEP, Anthony Braxton's Creative Orchestra, John Zorn, God Is My Co-Pilot, and Anthony Coleman's Selfhaters. He has performed throughout North America in theaters, on radio, and on television. As a composer, he has had works commissioned by William Winant, the Schanzer/Speach Duo, Kevin Norton, and more. In the late '90s, Lonberg-Holm relocated to Chicago where he has since become heavily involved in the free music scene. His projects there include the Trio Troppo with drummer Michael Zerang; leading the improvisational Light Box Orchestra and Pillow with Zerang, Liz Payne and Ben Vida of Town and Country, and Michael Colligan who plays, among other instruments, dry ice.
He also performs and records with Ken Vandermark, Jim O'Rourke, and Kevin Drumm, among others, and is a member of the Peter Brötzmann Tentet (a late-'90s all-star cast of top young improvisers, handpicked into one ensemble by fiery saxophonist and free jazz legend Brötzmann), which has albums on Chicago's Okkadisk label. In 1999, Pillow's self-titled debut came out on Boxmedia, and Site Specific, a recording of duos with various artists, was released on the Explain label. The downright accessible Terminal 4 came next in 2001, filled with catchy pop melodies. The next year, a trio recording with Glenn Kotche and Jason Roebke paid tribute to jazz cellist Fred Katz. Roebke joined Terminal 4 for the band's lovely follow-up, When I'm Falling. Lonberg-Holm kept up his active pace, on average performing on more than ten rock, jazz, and avant-garde albums per year, in addition to leading and touring with his own projects. ~ Joslyn Layne, Rovi
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Mat Maneri, a leading improvisational voice of his generation, was born in Brooklyn in 1969. He began studying the violin at the age of five, but since borrowing a viola for a jam session at the 1998 ECM festival in Badenweiler, he has made the viola his instrument of choice. Important influences on Maneri’s work – in addition to all the major forces of jazz – include Baroque music (which he studied with Juilliard String Quartet co-founder Robert Koff), Elliott Carter, and the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, which was also of central importance to his father, the late, great saxophonist, clarinettist, composer and educator Joe Maneri. Of his studies with Koff, Mat Maneri has said: “Studying Baroque music helped me to find my sound. [Koff] brought me into the world of contrapuntal playing and a way of using the bow that sounded more like a trumpet, like Miles, to my mind.”
Jazz writer Jon Garelick has written of Maneri’s distinctive style: “Maneri’s virtuosity is everywhere apparent – in his beautiful control of tone, in the moment-to-moment details that unfold in his playing, in the compositional integrity of each of his pieces, in what visual artists might call the variety of his ‘mark-making’: spidery multi-note runs, rhythmically charged double-stops and plucking, subtle and dramatic dynamic shifts.”