"William Parker is a bassist, improviser, composer, writer, and educator from New York City, heralded by The Village Voice as, "the most consistently brilliant free jazz bassist of all time."

In addition to recording over 150 albums, he has published six books and taught and mentored hundreds of young musicians and artists.

Parker's current bands include the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra, In Order to Survive, Raining on the Moon, Stan's Hat Flapping in the Wind, and the Cosmic Mountain Quartet with Hamid Drake, Kidd Jordan, and Cooper-Moore. Throughout his career he has performed with Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Milford Graves, and David S. Ware, among others."

"Few men have the musical experience, ability, and most importantly, intellectual perspective possessed by the jazz musician Bobby Kapp. In combination with a natural rhythmic sense, he is a force to be reckoned with as a vocalist and lyricist. He has been called a romantic, a Jazz Ambassador, an expatriate, and most importantly, a master musician; and to finish his most recent projects Themes 4 Transmutation and Cilla Sin Embargo, Bobby had to be all of these at once. His journey to becoming a man capable of wearing so many hats began in New Jersey, as a child who liked to sing.

Singing came before anything else. But as Bobby entered his teenage years, an opportunity to make money at his father's Tire Factory appeared, and with that hard-earned cash he bought his first drum set. At sixteen, he secured his first drumming gig with a group called George Ruben and the Stardusters, and began recognizing the reality of the musicians' life as something that he desired for himself. As his teenage years came to a close, he began sneaking off to Staten Island, and there found an affinity for the blues that derailed any possibility of staying in New Jersey.

For young musicians in the New York and New Jersey area in the 1960's, the resorts and vacation towns of Catskill Mountains were the ground floor to musical success. There young men could play, earn money, live with free room and board, drink beer and most importantly, develop their chops. What drove Bobby to the Catskills was the idea that he wasn't supposed to seek the musician's lifestyle, and, most importantly, the blues that he'd grown to love in Staten Island. There, he developed into a man who could make a living playing drums and singing, without ever ceasing to study the craft of his profession.

When life became complex in the US, Bobby's solution was simple: head South. Since making that decision, he has become a fixture for San Miguel De Allende in Mexico City. Some of the most important relationships in Bobby's life began and developed here, including his romance with Cilla, who is the inspiration for the recent album "Cilla Sin Embargo."

On top of this romantic necessity for making a new album, his recent musical explorations have again taken him on both sides of the border, through complex, different musical cultures, where the industry splits at the seams for both legal and social reasons. Themes 4 Transmutation, is his latest EP. It is experimental, completely free form jazz recorded in October, 2014, in New York City at Systems 2 studios, under Bobby's supervision. In the same vein tapped by Miles Davis during the composing and performance of "Kind of Blue," Bobby found the greatest pure improvisational jazz musicians New York had to offer: Tyler Mitchell on bass, Matthew Shipp on keys, and Ross Moshe playing saxophone. With little to no direction, and having never met each other before, the musicians delivered what Bobby and critics consider a masterpiece in freeform jazz.

Two months later, Bobby and his team were in Cuba, via Mexico, in the very last days before the U.S. embargo was eased. Originally meant as a gesture of dedication to the woman he loves, his latest project that has taken on a much larger meaning than was originally intended, becoming the first look for many Americans into the Cuban jazz scene without the overtone of economic tension... sin embargo.

So how was Bobby able to make two separate albums, in separate countries that at the time of the recording, were culturally exclusive of each other? What was needed to make it happen? "Resolving conflict is a problem thousands of years old. Good manners are the common denominator. In music you can have different points of view but still make sense of out the whole thing, in a peaceful beautiful way." "

"Matthew Shipp was born December 7, 1960 in Wilmington, Delaware. He started piano at 5 years old with the regular piano lessons most kids have experienced. He fell in love with jazz at 12 years old. After moving to New York in 1984 he quickly became one of the leading lights in the New York jazz scene. He was a sideman in the David S. Ware quartet and also for Roscoe Mitchell's Note Factory before making the decision to concentrate on his own music.

Mr Shipp has reached the holy grail of jazz in that he possesses a unique style on his instrument that is all of his own- and he's one of the few in jazz that can say so. Mr. Shipp has recorded a lot of albums with many labels but his 2 most enduring relationships have been with two labels. In the 1990s he recorded a number of chamber jazz cds with Hatology, a group of cds that charted a new course for jazz that, to this day, the jazz world has not realized. In the 2000s Mr Shipp has been curator and director of the label Thirsty Ear's "Blue Series" and has also recorded for them. In this collection of recordings he has generated a whole body of work that is visionary, far reaching and many faceted."

"Born in 1961 in São Paulo, Brazil, Perelman was a classical guitar prodigy who tried his hand at many other instruments - including cello, clarinet, and trombone - before gravitating to the tenor saxophone. His initial heroes were the cool jazz saxophonists Stan Getz and Paul Desmond. But although these artists' romantic bent still shapes Perelman's voluptuous improvisations, it would be hard to find their direct influence in the fiery, galvanic, iconoclastic solos that have become his trademark.

Moving to Boston in 1981, to attend Berklee College of Music, Perelman continued to focus on mainstream masters of the tenor sax, to the exclusion of such pioneering avant-gardists as Albert Ayler, Peter Brötzmann, and John Coltrane (all of whom would later be cited as precedents for Perelman's own work). He left Berklee after a year or so and moved to Los Angeles, where he studied with vibraphonist Charlie Shoemake, at whose monthly jam sessions Perelman discovered his penchant for post-structure improvisation: "I would go berserk, just playing my own thing," he has stated.

Emboldened by this approach, Perelman began to research the free-jazz saxists who had come before him. In the early 90s he moved to New York, a far more inviting environment for free-jazz experimentation, where he lives to this day. His discography comprises more than 50 recordings, with a dozen of them appearing since 2010, when he entered a remarkable period of artistic growth - and "intense creative frenzy," in his words. Many of these trace his rewarding long-term relationships with such other new-jazz visionaries as pianist Matthew Shipp, bassists William Parker, guitarist Joe Morris, and drummer Gerald Cleaver.

Critics have lauded Perelman's no-holds-barred saxophone style, calling him "one of the great colorists of the tenor sax" (Ed Hazell in the Boston Globe); "tremendously lyrical" (Gary Giddins); and "a leather-lunged monster with an expressive rasp, who can rage and spit in violence, yet still leave you feeling heartbroken" (The Wire). Since 2011, he has undertaken an immersive study in the natural trumpet, an instrument popular in the 17th century, before the invention of the valve system used in modern brass instruments; his goal is to achieve even greater control of the tenor saxophone's altissimo range (of which he is already the world's most accomplished practitioner).

Perelman is also a prolific and noted visual artist, whose paintings and sketches have been displayed in numerous exhibitions while earning a place in collections around the world."