"Marion Brown (September 8, 1931 - October 18, 2010) was an American jazz alto saxophonist and ethnomusicologist. He is most well known as a member of the 1960s avant-garde jazz scene in New York City, playing alongside musicians such as John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, and John Tchicai. He performed on Coltrane's landmark 1965 album Ascension.

Brown was born in Atlanta, in 1931. He joined the Army in 1953 and in 1956 went to Clark College to study music. In 1960 Brown left Atlanta and studied pre-law at Howard University for two years. He moved in 1962 to New York, where he befriended poet Amiri Baraka and musicians including Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Paul Bley, Clifford Thornton, and Rashied Ali. He appeared on several important albums from this period, such as Shepp's Fire Music and Attica Blues, but most notably John Coltrane's Ascension.

In 1967, Brown travelled to Paris, where he developed an interest in architecture, Impressionistic art, African music and the music of Erik Satie. In the late 1960s, he was an American Fellow in Music Composition and Performance at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Around 1970, he provided the soundtrack for Marcel Camus' film Le temps fou, a soundtrack featuring Steve McCall, Barre Phillips, Ambrose Jackson and Gunter Hampel.

Brown returned to the US in 1970, where he felt a newfound sense of creative drive. He moved to New Haven, Connecticut, to serve as a resource teacher in a child study center in the city's public school system until 1971. He composed and performed incidental music for a Georg Büchner play, Woyzeck. In 1971, Brown was an assistant professor of music at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, a position he held until he attained his Bachelor's degree in 1974. In addition to this role, he held faculty positions at Brandeis University (1971-74), Colby College (1973-74), and Amherst College (1974-75), as well as a graduate assistant position at Wesleyan University (1974-76). Brown earned a Master's degree in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan in 1976. His master's thesis was entitled "Faces and Places: The Music and Travels of a Contemporary Jazz Musician".

Throughout his tenure as an educator, Brown continued to compose, perform and record. Notable recordings during this period included Afternoon of a Georgia Faun for the ECM label in 1970 and three albums for the Impulse! label between 1973 and 1975. He played alto saxophone on the composition "Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim" from Harold Budd's 1976 release The Pavilion of Dreams, a piece originally written by Budd for Brown's Vista LP, released the previous year.

In 1972 and 1976, Brown received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, which he used to compose and publish several pieces for solo piano, one of which was based on the poetry of Jean Toomer in his book Cane. He also transcribed some piano and organ music by Erik Satie including his Messe des pauvres and Pages mysterieuses, and arranged the composer's Le Fils des étoiles for two guitars and violin.

In 1981, Brown began focusing on drawing and painting. His charcoal portrait of blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson was included in a New York City Kenkeleba Gallery art show called Jus' Jass, which also included works by artists such as Romare Bearden, Charles Searles and Joe Overstreet.

By the 2000s, Brown had fallen ill; due to a series of surgeries and a partial leg amputation, Brown resided for a time in a nursing home in New York. By 2005 he had moved to an assisted living facility in Hollywood, Florida, where he died in 2010, aged 79."

Ambrose Cyprian Jackson Jr. (Born: June 26, 1940 in Washington, D.C., died: November 14, 2009 in Hawthorne, New York) was an American trumpeter, played, among other with: Marion Brown, Steve Lacy, Duke Ellington, Alan Silva and Otis Redding. He was a member of the Anthony Braxton Creative Music Orchestra, and Charlie Persip And Superband.

An American guitarist and bassist active in the 1970s creative music scene, Patterson contributed to projects that bridged jazz, funk, and experimental idioms, bringing a flexible rhythmic sensibility and electric texture to ensemble settings.

A lesser-documented guitarist associated with Marion Brown's mid-1970s ensembles, Arlain's work emphasizes textural layering and rhythmic support, complementing groove-oriented improvisational frameworks.

"Fred Hopkins had one of the most forcefully distinctive sounds of any jazz bass player of the last 30 years. Many practitioners of an instrument that has grown in stature since the war were better known. Hopkins rarely led a band of his own and was involved in an exploratory jazz movement that struggled for recognition. Yet to bass players, and listeners who let his music touch them, Hopkins was a musician of remarkable expressiveness and formidable technique.

He was involved with many playing partners and appeared on innumerable recordings, but it was his work with the trio Air (also featuring saxophonist Henry Threadgill and drummer Steve McCall) that showed how inventive and responsive he could be. Air was a mercurial, sometimes aggressive, utterly ingenious ensemble that sprang out of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an influential Chicago self-help movement for experimental players developing in the wake of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane's approach to jazz which made musician-led infrastructures necessary because the mainstream record industry was terrified of it. The band was the perfect setting for Hopkins, with his big sound, maverick approach and boldness of conception.

Like Ray Brown and Wilbur Ware, he had a loud and lustrous sound, reverberating with overtones. But though he could sustain a dark, billowing backdrop for the work of busier partners, he was also capable of astonishing agility, horn-like flurries of improvised melody full of aching, slurred sounds, plucked effects like percussion, cliff-hanging bowing experiments, and sustained low notes that seemed to rise out of the floor like a church organ. He was an ideal foil for the light, restless McCall and the mercurial, emotional Threadgill.

Fred Hopkins grew up on Chicago's South Side, moved to New York in the 1970s, then returned to Chicago for his last years. For his understanding of group improvisation, and his ability to underpin and embroider spontaneous ensemble performance, he was much in demand and his playing partners included the leading figures of the 1960s and 1970s American avant-garde, including Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Don Pullen and the multi-faceted saxophone hero David Murray, whose groups turned out to be some of Hopkins's most fruitful outlets.

Like many Chicago jazz luminaries, Hopkins was inspired by Captain Walter Dyett's widely respected music programme at Du Sable High School. He also worked in the city's Civic Orchestra, and studied bass with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Joseph Guastafeste. He included among his lasting inspirations the classical bassist and conductor Serge Koussevitsky, but it was the Chicago free scene that revealed his potential.

The seeds of Air were sown in a 1971 band with the same line-up, called Reflections, the more lasting version being formed in 1975 as a free-improvising ensemble but one guided by the compositional inspiration of Threadgill, and at times exploring the work of elder statesmen such as Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton.

Fred Hopkins was as forceful, vivid and charismatic as his sound, and followed his own path as a performer. Yet he only took to leading bands in his last years, and it was as a supreme accompanist on an instrument he seemed to make both gentle and thunderously assertive that he was in his element."

"Edward Joseph Blackwell (October 10, 1929 - October 7, 1992) was an American jazz drummer born in New Orleans, Louisiana, known for his extensive, influential work with Ornette Coleman.

Blackwell's early career began in New Orleans in the 1950s. He played in a bebop quintet that included pianist Ellis Marsalis and clarinetist Alvin Batiste. There was also a brief stint touring with Ray Charles. The second line parade music of New Orleans greatly influenced Blackwell's drumming style and could be heard in his playing throughout his career.

Blackwell first came to national attention as the drummer with Ornette Coleman's quartet around 1960, when he took over for Billy Higgins in the quartet's stand at the Five Spot in New York City. He is known as one of the great innovators of the free jazz of the 1960s, fusing New Orleans and African rhythms with bebop. In the 1970s and 1980s Blackwell toured and recorded extensively with fellow Ornette Quartet veterans Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Dewey Redman in the quartet Old and New Dreams.

In the late 1970s Blackwell became an Artist-in-Residence at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Blackwell was a beloved figure on the Wesleyan Campus until he died.

In 1981, he performed at the Woodstock Jazz Festival, held in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Creative Music Studio. "The Ed Blackwell Project" members were Mark Helias, bass, Carlos Ward, alto sax/flute, and Graham Haynes (son of drummer Roy Haynes), cornet.

After years of kidney problems, Blackwell died in 1992. The following year he was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame."

A percussionist known for incorporating Afro-diasporic rhythmic traditions into jazz contexts, Santos added polyrhythmic depth and color, reinforcing the communal and groove-based aspects of Brown's music.

A drummer active in creative and groove-based jazz settings, Henderson provided driving rhythmic structures and flexibility, supporting the ensemble's blend of composed frameworks and open improvisation.