"Tatsuya Nakatani. Acoustic Sound Artist, Master Percussionist. b. 1970, Osaka Japan

Tatsuya Nakatani is an acoustic sound artist and master percussionist originally from Osaka, Japan. He has released over eighty recordings in North America and Europe. Residing in the USA since the mid-nineties, he has performed countless solo percussion concerts and has collaborated with hundreds of artists in international music festivals, university concert halls, art museums and independent venues. Infamous for his constant touring, Nakatani criss-crosses the country every year inspiring audiences with his pioneering sound. In addition to his solo performances, he conducts the Nakatani Gong Orchestra (NGO), a mobile community engagement project which organizes local ensembles performing on multiple bowed gongs.Nakatani teaches master classes and workshops at universities, giving students an opportunity to share his unique musical approach and philosophy for creating visceral, non-linear music.

He has created his own instrumentation, effectively inventing many instruments and extended techniques. Utilizing drums, gongs, cymbals, singing bowls, wooden sticks, metal objects, and the bows and mallets he handcrafts in his Kobo; he creates an intense, intuitively primitive, expressive music that defies genre. His work references improvised-experimental music, free jazz, and noise, while still retaining the sense of space and beauty found in traditional Japanese folk music."

"Composer and improviser, phonographer and performer, Shawn E. Hansen works outside: outside of convention, outside of expectations, and, sometimes, literally out-of-doors, outside the realm of the traditional concert stage or studio.

Hansen received a 2018 Charlotte Street Generative Performing Artist Award. His work goes beyond formal composition practices into the realm of conceptual art. Though he performs most often on analog electronic instruments, imagination is his medium.

He grew up in Prairie Village, Kansas. That's where he created his longest-running performance piece, KJEA-radio, an imaginary radio station he started when he was six years old.

KJEA-radio, at first, was purely conceptual, and then tangible, with Hansen making mix tapes (or misc. tapes, as his family called them) with recorded skits, fake talk shows and interviews, and deejaying records. "It moved into this kind of imaginary realm, or it stayed there, and functioned, as an adult, as another layer," he said.

KJEA-radio has traveled with him, so to speak, throughout his career; in graduate school, he turned it into a real radio station.

Hansen graduated from the University of Northern Colorado with degrees in theory and composition but decided to break out of the strict academic music path. He pursued a Master of Fine Arts at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Fine Arts at Bard College, where he studied with some of his heroes. [...]"

"Jeff Harshbarger is a contrabass player, and a Lecturer in Jazz Studies at B.M. University of Kansas. He also teaches private lessons in jazz bass. A prolific composer and bandleader in his own right, Jeff has recorded and performed across the globe with such varied groups as Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, Bobby Watson, Curtis Fuller, Milt Abel, Tango Lorca, The People's Liberation Big Band, and Alaturka. Jeff has received numberous grants and awards, including the Betty Carter Fellowship. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Kansas."