"Ken Filiano performs throughout the world, playing and recording with leading artists in jazz, spontaneous improvisation, classical, world/ethnic, and interdisciplinary performance, fusing the rich traditions of the double bass with his own seemingly limitless inventiveness. Ken's solo bass CD, subvenire (NineWinds), received widespread critical praise. For this and numerous other recordings, Ken has been called a creative virtuoso, a master of technique ... a paradigm of that type of artist... who can play anything in any context and make it work, simply because he puts the music first and leaves peripheral considerations behind.

Ken composes for his quartet with Michael Attias, Tony Malaby, and Michael T.A. Thomspon; a collective with Attias and Tomas Ulrich; and for his decades-long collaborations with Steve Adams and Vinny Golia. His prolific output also includes performances and/or recordings with artists including Bonnie Barnett, Rob Blakeslee, Bobby Bradford, Taylor Ho Bynum, Roy Campbell, John Carter, Nels Cline, Alex Cline, Connie Crothers, Mark Dresser, Ted Dunbar, Marty Ehrlich, Giora Feidman, Bob Feldman, Eddie Gale, Georgian Chamber Orchestra, Dennis Gonzalez, Lou Grassi, Phil Haynes, Fred Hess, Jason Hwang, Joseph Jarman, Sheila Jordan (with the Aardvark Orchestra), Raul Juarena, Joe Labarbera, Joelle Leandre, Frank London, Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, Tina Marsh, Warne Marsh, Dom Minasi, Hafez Modirzadeh, Butch Morris, Barre Phillips, Don Preston, Herb Robertson, Bob Rodriguez, Roswell Rudd, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Ursel Schlicht, Paul Smoker, Chris Sullivan, Peeter Uuskyla, Fay Victor, Biggi Vinkeloe, Kenny Wessel, Andrea Wolper, Pablo Ziegler. With Tomas Ulrich, Elliott Sharp, and Carlos Zingaro, he is a member of T.E.C.K. String Quartet.

Ken has been a guest lecturer, performer, and workshop leader at institutions in the United States and Europe. He earned a MM from Rutgers University and is currently on faculty at Mansfield University."- All About Jazz

"Lou Grassi is internationally known for his work in both the traditional and the avant-garde jazz worlds. He has literally played from Ragtime to No-Time - he toured with Ragtime pianist Max Morath and is the leader of the Dixie Peppers. He has performed and/or recorded with a wide range of outstanding artists including Marshall Allen, Billy Bang, Borah Bergman, Rob Brown, Roy Campbell, The Copascetics, James Garrison, Charles Gayle, Burton Greene, Urbie Green, Gunter Hampel, Johnny Hartman, Fred van Hove, Joseph Jarman, Sheila Jordan, William Parker, Perry Robinson, Roswell Rudd, John Tchicai, and Mark Whitecage. Lou appears on more than 70 recordings including more than 30 as a leader or co-leader.

Lou has toured extensively, performing throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Russia and Central America. He has been a featured artist at numerous international festivals including The Stork Music Festival, NYC; The Vision Festival, NYC; The Texaco New York Jazz Festival, NYC; The Rochester Jazz Festival, Rochester, NY; Summer's End Music Festival, Middletown, CT; Rive de Gier International Jazz Festival, France; Festas Lisboa, Portugal; CAMP 99, Tubingen, Germany; The Guelph Jazz Festival, Canada, Festival Frei Improvisierter Music, Dresden, Germany, the WIM Festival in Antwerp, Belgium, The Hurta Codell Festival of Improvised Music, Madrid, Spain and Egdefest, Ann Arbor, MI He has also performed at Banlieues Bleues Festival, Paris, France; Luneburg Jazz Nights, Germany; The Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival, NYC and The International Dixieland Festival of Dresden, Germany."

"A native New Yorker who grew up seeing the likes of Monk, Miles, Mingus, and Trane during the twilight of jazz's golden age, Todd Capp started playing drums as a student at the University of Chicago. He cut his musical teeth playing the blues in South Side basements while absorbing fresh approaches to sound, space and time developed by the newly-formed Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). He played his first session with Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, and Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup (author of Elvis' first hit, "That's All Right, Mama"), made his first recording (unreleased) with Anthony Braxton and Elvin Bishop, and performed his first concert, in l967, with a cooperative group including future AACM leader Douglas Ewart.

After a brief sojourn in Northern California, where he played tabla duets with the Pacific Ocean and performed with the Free Arts Workshop and visionary keyboard genius Eddie Sears, he returned to New York. He performed downtown with Denman Maroney at The Kitchen, uptown with Clyde Cotten's Kwanzaa Ensemble at the Club Baby Grand, and by the late 70's, his Improvising Orchestra, whose members included William Parker, Jason Hwang, and Roy Campbell, was a fixture on the downtown loft circuit. A 1978 recording, Quintessence (released in 1999), was deemed "timeless...a cosmic slice of history to be cherished by out/jazz lovers worldwide!" by Bruce Gallanter in the Downtown Music Gallery Newsletter.

Recipient of a 1980 Meet the Composer grant, he also promoted performances by the legendary Blind Boys of Alabama, and from the Improvising Orchestra's nucleus formed a new band called None of the Above. Working frequently at CBGB and other downtown dive bars (one even called The Dive), they were often compared to Talking Heads as a quirky, intellectual band you could dance to. But a gig in Toronto was cut short when the customers spent more time listening and dancing than drinking, a promised tour of France failed to materialize, and despite their single "Feel Like A Dog" becoming an underground hit via John Peel's pirate radio program, a U.K. tour also fell through. Eventually, he stopped playing, and in 1985 opened an art gallery in the East Village, exhibiting artists including notable "outsiders" Tony Fitzpatrick and Joe Coleman and the venerable folk artist David Butler.

Following the gallery's demise, Capp wrote the liner notes to Pete (La Roca) Sims' Blue Note CD, SwingTime, and the reissue of his classic Turkish Women at the Bath on 32 Jazz. An impromptu duet with John Coltrane's last drummer, Rashied Ali, inspired him to take up the drums again, and he returned to active playing in 2000. Since then, he has toured France with the Open Jazz Quartet, and performed in New York with the John Hagen trio, Joe Giardullo's Language of Swans, and Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffman, among others, at Cornelia St. Cafe, The Knitting Factory, Roulette, The Stone, Santos Party House - the gamut from ABC No Rio to Zebulon - as well as the 2010 Vision Festival.

Capp's longstanding ongoing collaboration with Bryan Eubanks and Andrew Lafkas, Oceans Roar 1000 Drums, has performed in Berlin and throughout the East Coast, including a set at the Sonic Circuits Festival in 2015, and produced two CDs. In recent years he has also performed with Connie Crothers at The Stone in New York, international artists Simone Wiessenfels, Per Gardin, and Hannes Buder at the Improhazard Festival in Peritz, Germany, and with Sylvain Kassap, Benjamin Duboc, and poet Steve Dalachinsky in Paris, France. In 2013, he formed Todd Capp's Mystery Train, an inter­generational eletcro­acoustic improvising ensemble blending free jazz, minimal drone, and dream­pop. He currently resides in Downtown Brooklyn, where he continues to improvise."

"Simone Weißenfels is one of Leipzig, Germany's most versatile artists in contemporary music and improvisation up to ambient and noise. Preferential she is improvising, using grand-piano, digital pianos and/or laptop."... Unusual sound-colours, dramatic changes of tempi! Sometimes vigourously, sometimes whispering softly! The explosive music of Simone Weißenfels arises through spontaneous play, a flowing communication of concrete ideas and prudent art. She creates wide soundscapes, abstraction, flowing chains of melodies and metrically unattached soundcolour-bunches. That's how she enters into suspenseful adventures of improvisation. ..."In the past she performed successfully the works of contemporary and classic composers as well as her own compositions. This background allows her to create hers own world on the piano without showing only flat virtuosity..performed with:Keir Neuringer, Marco Eneidi, Lol Coxhill, Gisela May, Willi Kellers, Connie Crothers,John Sinclair a.m.o.She has played.jazz-& improvisation-festivals in:Berlin, New York, Columbus, Nickelsdorf, Leipzig, Bochum, Nanjing a.m.o..concerts and tours to:USA, UK, Argentina, Taiwan, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, China, Ukraine, Griechenland and throughout GermanyFrequently she is performing in New York, played at Knitting Factory, The Stone, Brecht Forum, Scholes Studio, Ibeam a.m.o..Broadcasting company productions with DLF and WDR, interviews and recordings in USA, Germany, Taiwan, China and Bosnia-HerzegovinaAfter her ensemble multiboxx performed the International Festival in Nanjing 2004 in 2006 though 2008, she lead one of the first practical youth exchange projects of young Chinese and German musicians in Nanjing and Shanghai. This international ensemble performed the premiere of her composition "lullaby for K." by T. Brasch in Nanjing for 10.000 people and in Leipzig within the scope of the International 'Bach-Fest' in 2008.Since 2011 she is organizing share leipzig, a platform for portable artists of all genre.Simone Weißenfels is teaching piano at the world-famous Thomanerchor and 'Neue Musik' in Leipzig."