"Mark Helias is a renowned bassist, composer and producer who has performed throughout the world for more than four decades with some of the most important and innovative musicians in Jazz and Improvised Music including Don Cherry, Edward Blackwell, Anthony Davis, Dewey Redman, Anthony Braxton, Abbey Lincoln, Cecil Taylor, and Uri Caine among many others. A prolific composer, Helias has written music for two feature films as well as chamber pieces and works for large ensemble and big band. His orchestra piece "Stochasm" was premiered by the American Composers Orchestra in June of 2011. Twelve recordings of his music have been released since 1984, his latest being "The Signal Maker" on the Intakt label. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, and SIM (School for Improvisational Music) in Brookyn, NY."

"Ray Anderson has been continually noted as a contributor to the legacy of the slide trombone since his emergence in the 1970's, having won numerous Down Beat Critics Polls. He has shown remarkable musical range on the slide trombone and as a result reawakened interest in the instrument's expressive possibilities and sonic scope. He has led or co-led and composed for a daunting assortment of projects including tradition-minded ensembles, experimental groups, big bands, blues and funk projects and even a trombone quartet. He has performed and recorded with Anthony Braxton, David Murray, Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, Dr. John, the George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band, Luther Allison, Bennie Wallace, Henry Threadgill, John Scofield, Roscoe Mitchell, the New York Composers Orchestra, Sam Rivers' Rivbea Orchestra and countless others. Anderson is a gifted teacher and has been the Director of Jazz Studies at Stony Brook University since 2003. Anderson has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for U.S. Artists at International Festivals, the Oberon Foundation and Chamber Music America. In 2001 he became a John S. Guggenheim Fellow."

"Most artists who record an album as enthusiastically reviewed as The Aquarian Suite (2012), saxophonist Dan Blake's scintillating up-to-the-minute take on postbop - "one of the most ridiculously satisfying discs we've heard in some time," crowed the Boston Phoenix - would be eager to follow it up with something in the same vein. And that's just what he's done with The Digging (Sunnyside Records, 2016), a trio foray that features Eric Harland on drums. Blake's music has been called "stunning" (All About Jazz), for his work touring and recording both with his own projects and with luminaries of jazz and popular music like three-time Grammy winner Esperanza Spalding, NEA Jazz Master Anthony Braxton, Velvet Underground founding member John Cale and many others. His most recent release Da Fé (Sunnyside Records) - featuring legendary drummer Jeff Williams, pianists Carmen Staaf and Leo Genovese (who also plays an array of synthesizers), and bassist Dmitry Ishenko - was called "the perfect soundtrack for building a better world" (Monarch Magazine).

The Boston Globe has said Blake "regards tradition as a welcoming playground best approached with a sense of wonder and adventure." A frequent collaborator in this playground is the protean Argentine pianist Leo Genovese, whose recording Seeds (Palmetto) features Blake, who the New York Times called a "virtuoso." Downbeat writes that Blake "brings an intelligence and taste for adventure but also a solid swing and tradition-hugging mandate to his work as both player and writer."

One of those reasons is his burgeoning relationship with the Mivos Quartet, a leading new music chamber group for which he was commissioned to composer a new work by the Jerome Fund for New Music, with support from New Music USA's Composer Assistance Program. The project saw its release at New York's 2016 "Winter Jazzfest" and is now a feature-length DVD on the Infrequent Seams label. His work with Braxton led to an invitation for Blake to compose for the maestro's "Tricentric Orchestra". Blake has also received commissions to compose for recorderist Terri Hron, the Paris-based Spring Roll Quartet, the Dr. Faustus new music series, and the North/South Consonance Ensemble.

Beyond specific projects, Blake is simply an artist who lives for all manner of collaborations, as a composer as well as a tenor and soprano saxophonist. "That's the single most important thing to me," he said. "When you work with people, you inhabit some sort of world together, this feeling of connection. It's not about imposing an aesthetic ideal. Music represents the value of those relationships. It makes a powerful ethical statement."

In Blake's world, those collaborations can involve departed as well as living artists, as witness his ongoing relationship with onetime teacher Steve Lacy via his solo saxophone performances and hours of practicing long tones, scale patterns, circular breathing and multiphonics. "Lacy said playing solo was extremely important, but not to do it too much or I'd get too much into my own world. My approach involves just exploding my instrument, waiting for that point where an accident occurs, whether it's a squeak or a slip, and trying to do it again. I find that area of the instrument and exploit it through exploration."

Blake also has been happily tested by his many collaborations with the likes of pianist Danilo Perez, another onetime teacher of his, on whose "Panama Suite" he was featured, and percussionist-composer Lukas Ligeti (son of Gyorgy), in whose band he has played. But his experiences with the Mivos Quartet - violinists Olivia De Prato and Lauren Cauley, violist Victor Lowrie and cellist Mariel Roberts - have proven especially revelatory.

"I know it sounds strange, but I discovered with them that I could be a composer and also be myself," said Blake. "In the past, preparing a score and delivering it to the ensemble never quite got me there. Mivos is a classical group, but they got it right away, which was a big lesson for me. They charted out my writing for improvisation. The music is constructed in real time, organically. Things have great flexibility: A cello solo can go on for 30 seconds or 10 minutes. When the the right switch is sparked and things take off, it's amazing.

After acquiring a master's in composition from the Conservatory at the Brooklyn College of Music in 2008, he earned a Ph.D. in composition from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2013. His dissertation: "Performed Identities: Theorizing in New York's Improvised Music Scene," a subject he knew quite a lot about, having interviewed such brilliant players as Mary Halvorson, Ricardo Gallo, Peter Evans and James Ilgenfritz.

Blake's composition teachers included modern classical composers Robert Dick, Tania Leon, Jason Eckhardt and John McDonald; his influences included Karlheinz Stockhausen and Anthony Braxton. It's not surprising that his approach to improvisation was quite different from that of his friends trained in jazz.

As an educator, Dan Blake is active in the area of arts and social justice, which he teaches as part-time Assistant Professor at the New School for Social Research. He is the recipient of a 2022 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in music for his work creating the ballet and social justice project Got My Wings, an initiative that encourages students to use the arts as a vehicle for thinking about social justice issues. The project received a Humanities New York grant in 2023 to bring a new arts and social justice curriculum to high school students and educators."

"Satoshi Takeishi, drummer, percussionist, and arranger [born 6 February 1962] is a native of Mito Japan. He studied music at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. While at Berklee he developed an interest in the music of South America and went to live in Colombia following the invitation of a friend. He spent four years there and forged many musical and personal relationships. One of the projects he worked on while in Colombia was "Macumbia" with composer/arranger Francisco Zumaque in which traditional, jazz and classical music were combined. With this group he performed with the Bogota symphony orchestra to do a series of concerts honoring the music of the most popular composer in Colombia, Lucho Bermudes. In 1986 he returned to the U.S. in Miami where he began work as an arranger. In 1987 he produced "Morning Ride" for jazz flutist Nestor Torres on Polygram Records. His interest expanded to the rhythms and melodies of the middle east where he studied and performed with Armenian-American oud master Joe Zeytoonian. Since moving to New York in 1991 he has performed and recorded with many musicians such as Ray Barretto, Carlos "Patato" Valdes, Eliane Elias, Marc Johnson, Eddie Gomez, Randy Brecker, Dave Liebman, Anthony Braxton, Mark Murphy, Herbie Mann, Paul Winter Consort, Rabih Abu Khalil, Toshiko Akiyoshi Big Band, Erik Friedlander and Pablo Ziegler to name a few. He continues to explore multi-cultural, electronics and improvisational music with local musicians and composers in New York."