"Michaël Attias is a quietly fierce force on the international improvising scene. With a brisk and calming tone Attias is a thinker, traveler, questioner. Born in Israel, raised in Paris and the American Midwest, he has lived in NYC since 1994.

As a leader, Attias has released five critically-acclaimed albums since 2005: Credo, Renku, Renku in Coimbra, Twines of Colesion and, in 2012, Spun Tree. As a sideman, he has performed and recorded all over the world alongside some of today's most compelling musicians: Anthony Braxton, Paul Motian, Anthony Coleman, Masabumi Kikuchi, Tony Malaby, Ralph Alessi, Oliver Lake, Tom Rainey, John Hébert, Nasheet Waits, Sean Conly, Ken Filiano, Kris Davis, and many others.

His current projects include his long-standing trio Renku, with John Hébert and Satoshi Takeishi; Spun Tree, with Ralph Alessi, Matt Mitchell, Sean Conly, Tom Rainey; and the new Michaël Attias Quartet with Aruàn Ortiz, John Hébert and Nasheet Waits.

Michaël Attias has also established himself as creator of live musical scores and sound designs for theatre including, since 2008, five collaborations with legendary director Robert Woodruff: Chair, Notes From Underground, Battle of Black and Dogs, Autumn Sonata, and In a year With Thirteen Moons. These were produced at such prominent New York and regional theatres as Yale Repertory Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and The Duke on 42nd Street.

Michaël Attias was named a 2000 Artists' Fellowship Recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts and was awarded a MacDowell Arts Colony fellowship in Fall 2008. From 2003 to 2008, he curated the critically acclaimed and highly successful new music series, Night of the Ravished Limbs, at Barbès in Brooklyn, welcoming a wide array of established names such as Barre Philips, Tim Berne, Mark Helias, Jason Moran, as well as an impressive list of rising New York talent including Mary Halvorson, Eivind Opsvik, Gerald Cleaver, and many more.

Earlier

The product of migrations spanning North Africa, the Middle East, Western Europe and the American Midwest, Attias was born in Haïfa, Israel in 1968 and spent the first part of his childhood in Paris, where he attended the music conservatory and studied violin for a brief period. His family moved to Minneapolis in 1977. An early passion for the music of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman led him to start playing the alto saxophone at the age of 15 under the guidance of great Minneapolis saxophonist and composer Pat Moriarty, while attending the Children's Theatre School. Avid for adventure and experience, he graduated from high school as a junior and traveled for a year in Europe before enrolling at New York University as a Film and Music student. Somewhere in between, he had the great privilege of taking a couple of lessons with Lee Konitz. Judging that school was interfering with his education, he dropped out after the spring semester, went back to Paris for a year where he wrote a novel called Twines of Colesion (1000 pages thankfully destroyed), came back to the US for an eight-month cross-country trip that took him from New York City to San Francisco via Mexico, and returned to Paris in 1989 where he became bartender at the IACP, a music school founded by legendary bassist Alan Silva. There he met such heroes of the ex-pat scene as Steve Lacy, Sunny Murray, Frank Wright, Bobby Few and others. He recorded with a pianoless quartet dedicated to the music of Thelonious Monk, Four in One (In Situ 1992), made his first album as leader and composer with a quintet of French musicians (released on Igal Foni's For Elevators/Jazzis, 1993). In January 1993, at the prompting of Anthony Braxton, he moved back to the US, sat in on his classes at Wesleyan University for one semester and finally moved to New York the following winter."

"Anthony Coleman (born August 30, 1955) is an avant-garde jazz pianist. During the 1980s and 1990s he worked with John Zorn on Cobra, Kristallnacht, The Big Gundown, Archery, and Spillane and helped push modern Jewish music into the 21st century.

At the age of thirteen, Coleman started studying piano with Jaki Byard. At the New England Conservatory of Music he studied with George Russell, Donald Martino and Malcolm Peyton.

Coleman's collaborators over the years have included guitarist Elliott Sharp, trumpeter Dave Douglas, accordion player Guy Klucevsek, composer David Shea, former Captain Beefheart bandmember Gary Lucas, classical and klezmer clarinetist David Krakauer, guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist Greg Cohen, drummer Joey Baron and saxophonist Roy Nathanson.

Coleman's compositions and solo work reflect his interest in his Jewish background. His groups Sephardic Tinge and Selfhaters in the 1990s explored both the lively, rich and exuberant musical legacy as well as darkly described the lamentation of a minority culture in Diaspora. Sephardic Tinge toured extensively, especially throughout Europe, in the 1990s and the early 2000s.

Coleman's Disco by Night is a work inspired by his visit to his family's homeland of Yugoslavia and was his first major solo record released by Japan's Avant Records in 1992. Shmutsige Magnaten, in which he played the songs of Yiddish folk composer Mordechai Gebirtig, a victim of the Holocaust was also released by Tzadik Records in 2006. It was recorded live at midnight in the oldest synagogue of Kraków, Poland, a few steps away from Gebirtig's birthplace during the annual Kraków Jewish Music Festival in 2005.

His duo albums, The Coming Great Millenium, Lobster & Friend, and I Could've Been a Drum with Roy Nathanson, mostly explore the fun, frivolous and joyous alongside the nostalgic hearts and minds of Jews in modern and old America. These recordings typify Coleman's "free" playing style as well as his multi-instrumental capabilities with him also operating samplers, trombones, percussion as well as piano and voice. Coleman and Nathanson have performed all over the U.S. and Europe.

Coleman is also an accomplished composer with many works being commissioned by numerous ensembles including the 2006 work Pushy Blueness which was released on Tzadik.

His work includes Damaged by Sunlight, issued on DVD in France by La Huit, the album Freakish: Anthony Coleman plays Jelly Roll Morton (Tzadik); a monthlong residency in Venice as a guest of Venetian Heritage, a commission for the Parisian Ensemble Erik Satie: Echoes From Elsewhere; tours of Japan and Europe with guitarist Marc Ribot's band Los Cubanos Postizos; a lecture/performance as part of the symposium "Anton Webern und das Komponieren im 20 Jahrhundert" (Neue Perspektiven, Basel, Switzerland) and a commission from the String Orchestra of Brooklyn (Empfindsamer).

He has been on the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music since 2005 and Mannes College New School for Music since 2012. His album The End of Summer features his NEC Ensemble Survivors Breakfast.

Coleman has degrees in composition from the New England Conservatory of Music and the Yale School of Music and attended Mauricio Kagel's seminar at Centre Acanthes in Aix-en-Provence, France. He has received grants and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Djerassi Colony, the Civitella Ranieri Center, the Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg Kulturbehörde and the Yellow Springs Arts Center. He spent the spring semester of 2003 teaching theory and composition at Bennington College in Vermont. In 2004 he was the subject of a three-day festival, Abstract Adventures, in Brussels, Belgium.

Coleman writes articles for All About Jazz and Bomb magazine and was a contributor to John Zorn's essay collection Arcana: Musicians on Music in 2000.

In the mid 1990s, Coleman appeared in Sabbath in Paradise, Claudia Heuermann's documentary about Jewish music in the avant-garde downtown scene in New York, A Bookshelf on Top of the Sky, Heuermann's documentary about John Zorn, and Following Eden. In 2005 Coleman was interviewed for the Marc Ribot documentary The Lost String, directed by Anais Prosaic."

Andy Allen, aka Friendship Ceremonies, is a clarinetist and wind player, known for the groups Bushwhacked, Creative Healing, Guerilla Toss, Hollow Deck, and Gloyd.

"Diamanda La Berge Dramm (1991) grew up in Amsterdam, the Netherlands playing the violin since the age of four. Growing up among the leading figures of the Dutch classical, avant-garde and improvisation scene, her own concerts reflect all of these elements. At the age of thirteen, she premiered "Raadsels" by Louis Andriessen in the Concertgebouw for the opening of the Holland Festival 2005 and has gone on to perform internationally as a soloist, chamber music player and band member. In April 2018 Diamanda won the Dutch Classical Talent Tour & Award, the first ever string soloist to do so.

She has worked extensively with modern music luminaries such as Christian Wolff, Alvin Lucier, Gunther Schuller, Chaya Czernowin, Garth Knox and George Benjamin. Recent performances include a collaboration in Florence with Georg Friedrich Haas and concerts in Brussels and London with avant-garde rock legend John Cale.

You can hear her on New World Records as a soloist on Burr van Nostrand's Voyage in a White City, and on Tzadik Records with Anthony Coleman.

She completed her Bachelor of Music at the New England Conservatory in Boston with James Buswell and Nicholas Kitchen, and previously studied with Lex Korff de Gidts (Conservatory of Amsterdam). At graduation, she was awarded the John Cage Award for her contribution to new music.

Diamanda received her Masters of Music from the Royal Conservatory of the Hague, studying with Vera Beths. She was awarded the Nicolai Prize for the most exceptional recital.

Current projects include the editing and premiering of a new series of violin studies by Garth Knox, and a duo with pianist Helena Basilova focusing on early 20th century Eastern European repertoire.

As a Splendor Founder she plays and hosts concerts regularly.Splendor is a collective of 50 musicians, composers, and stage artists who transformed an old bathhouse in the heart of Amsterdam into a local cultural paradise."

"Mia Friedman is a fiddler, singer and banjo player. She is largely influenced by American roots music and old-time Appalachian traditions, and blends this with contemporary music in her compositions. Her song "Across the Water" won the 2010 John Lennon Songwriting Contest in the folk category, and she was the 2006 New Hampshire Highland Games Scottish Fiddle Champion. Mia performs in Ari & Mia, a duo she has with her sister, Ariel Friedman. They have toured all over the United States, and have four CDs, two of which were ranked high on National folk radio charts. Mia also plays with Hollow Deck - a duo of tape collage, vocals, and woodwinds - and avant-garde rock band, Creative Healing. Mia graduated from New England Conservatory in 2012 where she studied with Anthony Coleman, Carla Kihlstedt, and Hankus Netsky. Locally she spent several years teaching strings at the Community Music School of Springfield and the Hartsbrook School. She has been co-directing the Fiddle Orchestra of Western Massachusetts since 2021."

Simon Hanes is a bassist, a graduate from New England Conservatory and has played in the then-Boston-based No(ise) Wave unit Guerilla Toss, adopting the "Luxardo" persona as an arranger, composer, conductor, and guitarist, and went on to assemble the band Tredici Bacci. He also is a member of the Zorn influenced band Trigger.

"Andria Nicodemou is a multifaceted musician from Cyprus, specializing in vibraphone and improvisation. She is a graduate from Corfu University in Classical Percussion and has received a Master's Degree from the New England Conservatory, in Contemporary Improvisation.

She has been working in diverse interdisciplinary art projects, with multi-media artists, dancers and actors in Europe and USA. She has worked with musicians such as Joe Morris, Anthony Coleman, Marty Ehrlich, Ikue Morri, Tayler Ho Bynum, Tatsuya Nakatani, Ab Baars, Anne La Berge, Gianni Lenoci, Jim Hobbs, Marc Sanders, among others. She was a guest performer at the London Improvisers Orchestra (2015) and the Royal Improvisers Orchestra in Amsterdam (2014).

Andria is the co-founder of the Thread Ensemble, a story-telling, improvisatory trio a result of a 2012 Ensemble Fellowship in NEC's Community Performances & Partnerships Department. With their unique teaching approach, Thread Ensemble has been performing and giving interactive workshops in the Boston Public Schools, ever since.

With her unique voice she has established herself as one of the important emerging musicians in the experimental, improvised music idioms.

In July of 2014 she received the honorary visa for prominent artistic personalities, 'Artist with an extraordinary ability in the fields of art' from the USA."

"Ashley Paul is an American multi-instrumentalist/composer based in London. Her intuitive process integrates free form song structures with a focused approach to sound. Using a complexity of instruments including saxophone, clarinet, voice, prepared guitar and percussion she creates a delicate palette, uniquely her own."

"Simón Willson is a Chilean born, New York City based bassist, composer and improviser. As an eclectic and in demand sideman, he has toured with a host of different artists in Europe, the US, Canada, and South America. His wide-ranging interest in different realms of Jazz and improvised music has led him to work with a diverse pool of established artists such as Dave Douglas, Ethan Iverson, Steve Cardenas, George Garzone, Jason Palmer, Rodney Green, Pablo Held, Jim Black, Tim Miller, Frank Carlberg, among many others. He also plays in bands of contemporaries such as Kevin Sun and Max Light. In addition to his sideman work, he co-leads the bands Great on Paper, Family Plan, and Earprint. The latter won the "best debut album" category of the NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll in 2016, and Family Plan released its debut album September 2021 due to receiving a generous grant from the Chilean government. Willson can be heard on over thirty records for labels such as Tzadik, Steeplechase, Newvelle, Fresh Sound New Talent, Endectomorph, in addition to a number of self-releases. He has recently been featured in albums as a member of Dave Douglas' Sextet, Elan Mehler's "TJ & the Revenge'' project alongside GRAMMY award-winning guitar player Bill Frisell, and a double record entitled "Live at Wally's'' with celebrated trumpet player Jason Palmer as part of his quintet."