Lakshminarayanan Shankar (born April 26, 1950), also known as L. Shankar, Shankar or Shenkar, is a violinist, vocalist and composer. Early life
L. Shankar was born in Madras, Tamil Nadu. Growing up in Jaffna, Ceylon, where his father V. Lakshminarayan was a professor at the Jaffna College of Music, Shankar was exposed to Carnatic music and other styles from an early age. His father was an esteemed violinist, his mother L.
Egberto Amin Gismonti (born December 5, 1947 in Carmo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is a brazilian composer, guitarist and pianist. Gismonti began his formal music studies at the age of six on piano. After studying classical music for 15 years, he went to Paris to study orchestration and analysis with Nadia Boulanger and the composer Jean Barraqué, a disciple of Arnold Schönberg and Anton Webern. After his return to Brazil, Gismonti began to explore other musical genres.
Guitarist Ivar Grydeland and percussionist Ingar Zach, prime movers and catalysts for free improvised music in Norway, got in touch with Christian Wallumrød after hearing his “Sofienberg Variations” on ECM and they have since worked together in diverse combinations including, since 2004, ‘Dans les arbres’ a project completed by French clarinettist Xavier Charles. Their radical all-acoustic improvisation explores sonorities and textures that frequently sound electronic, and also often sounds ‘composed’ – with echoes of Cage and the New York School.
Arild Andersen (born October 27, 1945) is a Norwegian bass player. He started out as a member of the Jan Garbarek Quartet (1967-1973), with Terje Rypdal and Jon Christensen. In the same period he also worked with the Norwegian singer Karin Krog and played in the rhythm section for visiting American musicians including Phil Woods, Dexter Gordon, Hampton Hawes, Johnny Griffin, Sonny Rollins, and Chick Corea. During this time, he also worked with Don Cherry and George Russell. Andersen has recorded over a dozen albums for ECM Records as band leader, and appeared on many others as side man.
Stefano Bollani is a jazz pianist born in Milan on December 5, 1972. He made his professional debut at fifteen and received his diploma in piano from the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini in Florence. He does classical music, contemporary jazz, Brazilian jazz, and pop rock.
Longlasting has been his collaboration (from 1996) with Enrico Rava: 12 records together, the last was Tati, ECM 2005, in trio with Paul Motian, battery.
The composer and director Heiner Goebbels (born 1952) belongs to the most important exponents of the contemporary music and theatre scene. His compositions (distributed by Ricordi) are performed by various orchestras and ensembles, his radio works broadcasted by many German speaking radio stations and regularly there are about eight music theater productions in the repertoire of Ensemble Modern, Theatre Vidy, Les Percussions de Strasbourg and artmobil which have been showed and are to be seen on many major international music and theatre festivals.
Bill Frisell was born in Baltimore, but was raised in Denver, CO. Once a classical clarinetist, he established a firm base in his traditional harmonic knowledge early on in life. Throughout high school and college he also played guitar in various rock and R&B groups in the Denver area. During high school, however, he became profoundly interested in jazz guitar. In 1971 Frisell attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA, and also began studying with Jim Hall, one of the prominent jazz guitarists of the 1960s.
Russ Sargeant is an electric/double bassist and guitarist based near Birmingham, England. His music is a rhythmic blend of jazz and ambient sounds.
Born in Tavistock, Devon in 1944, composer/multi-instrumentalist John Surman is one of the key figures in a generation of European musicians who have crucially expanded the international horizons of jazz during the past thirty years or so. Long acknowledged as an improviser of world class, Surman has also composed a body of work which extends far beyond the normal range of the jazz repertoire. Already, by the late 60s, it was clear that Surman was a phenomenon.