"A former student of Wadada Leo Smith's, Drew Gardner has played with John Tchicai, Rob Brown, Sabir Mateen, Chris Lightcap, Ehran Elisha and many others. His is the musical director of Daria Fain's Dance group. He spent his teenage years playing drums in a punk rock band. In the early 90s he lived in San Francisco, writing and working as a jazz drummer. Since 1996 he has lived in New York City, conducting and experimenting in extensive poetomusical collaborations with his Poetics Orchestra. He is a pioneer of the Flarf poetry movement and a multi-instrumentalist. He has written three books of poetry, the lastest of which is Chomp Away his debut recording as a leader."

"John Martin Tchicai (April 28, 1936 - October 8, 2012) was a Danish free jazz saxophonist and composer.

After moving to New York City in 1963, Tchicai joined Archie Shepp's New York Contemporary Five and the New York Art Quartet. He played on John Coltrane's Ascension, and Albert Ayler's New York Eye and Ear Control, both influential free jazz recordings.

Tchicai was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, to a Danish mother and a Congolese father. The family moved to Aarhus, where he studied violin in his youth, and in his mid-teens began playing clarinet and alto saxophone, focusing on the latter. By the late 1950s he was travelling around northern Europe, playing with many musicians.

Following his work in New York, Tchicai returned to Denmark in 1966, and shortly thereafter focused most of his time on music education. He formed the small orchestra Cadentia Nova Danica with Danish and other European musicians; this group collaborated with Musica Elettronica Viva and performed in multi-media events. Tchicai was a founding member of Amsterdam's Instant Composers Pool in 1968, and in 1969 took part in the recording of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions.

On August 30, 1975, Tchicai's appearance at the Willisau Jazz Festival was recorded and released later that year as Willi The Pig. On this record, he plays with Swiss pianist Irène Schweizer. Tchicai returned to a regular gigging and recording schedule in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s he switched to the tenor saxophone as his primary instrument. In 1990 he was awarded a lifetime grant from the Danish Ministry of Culture.

Tchicai and his wife relocated to Davis, California, in 1991, where he led several ensembles. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1997. He was a member of Henry Kaiser and Wadada Leo Smith's "Yo Miles" band, a loose aggregation of musicians exploring Miles Davis's electric period.

Since 2001 he had been living near Perpignan in southern France. On June 11, 2012, he suffered a brain hemorrhage in an airport in Barcelona, Spain. He was recovering and had canceled all appearances when he died in a Perpignan hospital on October 8, 2012, aged 76."

"Marco Eneidi (November 1, 1956 Ð May 24, 2016) was an American jazz alto saxophonist. He was primarily associated with free jazz.

Eneidi was born in Portland, Oregon. His father worked for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and his mother was a paralegal. Eneidi and his family lived in Livermore before moving to Oakland, California. As a child, he took lessons with Sonny Simmons. He attended Mt. Hood Community College before earning a Bachelor of Arts degree from Sonoma State University and Master of Arts from Mills College. Later in his career, he studied North Indian classical music at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, California.

Eneidi moved to New York City in 1981 to study with Jimmy Lyons. He started to play with Jackson Krall, William Parker and Denis Charles. In 1984, he was hired by Bill Dixon to teach at Bennington College. In the early-1990s, he recorded his first important dates as a leader, such as Final Disconnect Notice. He was hired by Cecil Taylor, with whom he played in Europe. Eneidi moved back to the West Coast in the late 1990s, notably playing with Glenn Spearman. In 2005, he moved to Vienna, where he ran weekly free improvisation sessions until his move to Mexico in 2015."

"Vytas Nagisetty started playing music at the age of five, and electric bass at ten. At fourteen he formed a rock band with neighborhood friends in his hometown of Toledo, Ohio. Later, he studied classical bass with Steve Tramontozzi at the University of California, Berkeley. At the same time he learned to play jazz amidst artists like Charlie Hunter and Vijay Iyer in the vibrant music scene of the Bay Area in the '90s. He played with greats like Steve Coleman, Mike Stern, and the legendary Pharaoh Sanders.

Vytas' career shifted to composing for film when he moved to New York City in 1997. While living there he composed and performed the scores to four feature films and several shorts. Notably, he wrote and performed the score to Desert Blue, Kate Hudson's first feature film. He also performed at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin for the premiere, sharing the billing with Rilo Kiley and Catpower. Composing for film and songwriting pushed Vytas to learn to play more instruments besides bass. He has performed on guitar, cello, banjo, harmonica, piano, harmonium, sitar, organ, and voice for various film and song recordings.

In 2003, he returned to his hometown and refocused on jazz and classical bass, as well as songwriting. He recorded over forty original songs in the eight years he was back in Ohio. His original songs have been released with two different groups: Vytas and his Electric Outfit, and Local Honey. Local Honey brought together an eclectic instrumentation to play upbeat songs inspired by diverse influences like bluegrass, jazz, reggae, tango, blues, classical, rock, and more.

Vytas now lives in Portland, Oregon. He teaches at the Sound Roots School of Music, and performs locally with his sister's band, Ramune Rocket 3, as well as solo. He is working on developing a Portland-based version of Local Honey.

Some influences Vytas cites are Charles Mingus, Dave Holland, Charlie Haden, Jaco Pastorius, Edgar Meyer, Thierry Barbe, Francois Rabbath, "Family Man" Barret, Bootsy Collins, John Entwistle, Les Claypool, Paul McCartney, Bernard Hermann, Ennio Morricone, and Willie Nelson."