"Jawwaad Taylor is a trumpeter, composer, producer, educator, and social activist.

He is a founding member of the group Shape of Broad Minds, whose critically-acclaimed album, Craft of the Lost Ark, brought Taylor international attention. Taylor performs with jazz, free jazz, and improvisers, as well as hip hop artists, from around the world. As co-founder and producer of the band, The Young Mothers, he merges modern jazz, improvisation, hip hop, indie rock, and Afro-grooves. He collaborates regularly with and performs with MacArthur Fellow Carrie Mae Weems and other visual artists, and combines his compositions with their visual work.

Taylor's list of performances includes countless national and international festivals such as the Hove Festival, Sonar Festival, Meltdown Festival, and the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. Taylor is an alumnus at the Red Bull Music Academy and is committed to his hometown of Houston, TX. There, he studied and participated in workshops with Pauline Oliveros, and was a member of the Deep Listening Institute and Nameless Sound. He attended Prairie View A&M University.

The New York-based cultural philanthropy organization Creative Capital awarded Jawwaad Taylor a $100,000 prize for the production of a new sculpture and music performance. Start With Self, Taylor's project, is based on his research and experience with sonic healing as a sickle cell anemia survivor."

Jason Jackson: "Saxophonist from Houston, Texas, known for his work with jazz and experimental groups."

"Drummer Stefan González was born in Dallas, Texas. Raised in a musical household, he took early inspiration to start drumming from the elders who rehearsed and recorded with his father, Dennis González Ð the masters Alvin Fielder, W.A. Richardson, Andrew Cyrille, and Louis Moholo. By the age of 11 he had put together his first heavy grunge bands (Facelift and Oblivion) and he started focusing on his main project, Akkolyte. Akkolyte, which started as a solo project in which Stefan overdubbed drums, guitar, bass, and vocals, added Aaron on electric bass, and it became a duo. By 2004 Akkolyte had already done a myriad of successful mini tours and an all encompassing 28 day tour of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. He also began playing in the family New Jazz/Improv trio Yells At Eels.

Stefan has since gone on to play with the bands Target Rats, Terminal Dysentery, Just Another Consumer, Waking Terror, Rat Salad, Forbes/Young/Gonzalez Trio, =2 0Unconscious Collective, and the Portuguese group Luis Lopes' Humanization Quartet, as well as leading a big band with fellow experimental improvisers in Mexico City in 2006: German Bringas, Remi Alvarez, Gabriel Lauber, and many others.

In the free improvisational/avant garde jazz realm he has played and recorded with Oliver Lake, Sabir Mateen, Douglas Ewart, Tim Green, George Cartwright, Ernest Khabeer Dawkins, Rodrigo Amado, Luis Lopes, Tatsuya Nakatani, Faruq Z. Bey, Damon Smith, Alvin Fielder, Leena Conquest, Famoudou Don Moye, and many more. Recent endeavors have included touring the East Coast and Colombia with Puerto Rican punk legends Cojoba, as well as the recording of Akkolyte's long awaited LP."

Jonathan Farrell Horne (b. 1983, Knoxville, Tennessee) is a self-taught guitarist whose work spans free jazz, experimental, indie and psychedelic contexts. Since relocating to Austin, Texas (circa 2004), Horne has participated in numerous creative collaborations, including with Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (in projects like Young Mothers). In 2018, a serious hand injury (a ruptured tendon) threatened his playing career; after multiple surgeries-one of which was facilitated through the Musician Treatment Foundation-he returned to active performance. His guitar work is known for its textural boldness and willingness to embrace risk, distortion, feedback, and abstraction alongside melodic gestures.

"Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (b. 1971, Oppdal) - studied Jazz at the Music Consevatory in Trondheim, Norway (1992-1995) under the tutelage of bassplayer Odd Magne Gridseth.

When one listens to the great bassists in modern jazz history, a striking thing (though it may not be immediately arrived at) is that greatness is reached through open-mindedness and diversity. William Parker, Malachi Favors Maghostut, Peter Kowald, Wilbur Ware, Bertram Turetsky, Buell Neidlinger - all of these bass players have embraced a lifestyle of playing all sorts of music and the breadth of each musicians' technique is a testament to those experiences. Norwegian bassist and composer Ingebrigt Håker Flaten is also a musician whose experience is both geographical and aesthetic. While the fertile Scandinavian new jazz scene offered a vast amount of opportunities to work in different bands with musicians whose concepts are as individual as the grains in a reed, Flaten has found home and on-the-bandstand education in places as far flung as Chicago and his current residence Austin, Texas.

A muscular player whose tone and attack run the gamut from Paul Chambers to Buschi Niebergall, his sense of both openness and control serves ensembles as diverse as The Thing, Free Fall, Atomic, Scorch Trio and the Kornstad/Håker Flaten Duo. In addition to his own Chicago Sextet and Austin-centric Young Mothers, Flaten has also recorded and performed with Frode Gjerstad, Dave Rempis, Bobby Bradford, the AALY Trio, Ken Vandermark, Stephen Gauci, Tony Malaby, Daniel Levin, Dennis Gonzalez and numerous others. Flaten studied at the Conservatory in Trondheim (1992-1995), turning professional shortly afterward, yet his hunger to play in new situations with new musicians - schooled or amateur, frequently recorded or just starting out - puts him in a rare class, that of a truly broad-minded artist. That mettle has served him well, living and developing the music under his own steam and drawing from influences as diverse as Derek Bailey, George Russell, Chris McGregor, filmmakers Ingmar Bergman, contemporary pop melody and gritty punk music as well as everyday sights and sounds.

There is a calmness and self-assuredness that imbues all great artists, in that the diversity of their work comes with very little ego. Flaten's artistry is often in collective, leaderless ensembles and in fact, following a decade of professional musicianship it wasn't until 2004 that his leader-debut was released - Quintet (Jazzland, followed in 2008 by The Year of the Boar, and a Sextet recording is upcoming). This latter fact is partly due to the necessity of a copacetic situation - in an interview in 2010 with the Austinist he noted that "I use people where I'm located. It's inspiring to have your own band to write for, but you have to make sure that people feel free and not limited by the music; the compositions should lead the way to a player's open mind, and that is a challenge." Certainly not every bandleader/composer thinks this way.

In 2011, he formed another ensemble, The Young Mothers, which includes drummers Stefan Gonzalez (Dallas) and Frank Rosaly (Chicago), trumpeter/poet/rapper Jawaad Taylor (New York), saxophonist Jason Jackson (Houston), and Jonathan Horne (Austin) on guitar. It's a group of varying levels and influences and as it grows organically, will be another excellent lens through which to view Flaten's aesthetic, philosophy, and musicianship. The next few years see him in a position where established ensembles can steep and spread their influence, while experimenting with and nurturing a wide range of new relationships."

"Frank Rosaly (Francisco Javier Rosaly Amoros Rosello - b. 5/30/74 Phoenix, AZ) is a drummer and composer living in Chicago. He has been involved in the improvised and experimental music community since 2001 where he has become an integral part of Chicago's musical fabric, navigating a fine line between the vibrant improvised music, experimental, rock and jazz communities. He contributes much of his time to performing, composing, teaching, as well as organizing musical events, while also touring regularly domestically and internationally.

Frank is currently active in many projects throughout Chicago as well as New York and in Europe. Some groups include Bobby Bradford/Frode Gjerstad Quartet, Matana Robert's Chicago Project, Rob Mazurek's Mandarin Movie, The Rempis Percussion Quartet, Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten Quintet, Scorch Trio, Nicole Mitchell Ice Crystal Quartet, Jason Stein Quartet, Jeff Parker/Nels Cline Quartet, Josh Abrams' Natural Information Society, Fred Lonberg-Holm's Valentine Trio, Keefe Jackson's Project Project, The Fast Citizens, The Jeb Bishop Trio, Jason Adasievicz's Rolldown, Jorrit Dijkstra's Flatlands Collective, Chicago Lucern Exchange, Hearts and Minds, Slow Cycle, Outskirts, Darren Johnston's Chicago Quintet, Anchor and others."