Ravi Coltrane is a critically acclaimed Grammy™ nominated saxophonist, bandleader, and composer. In the course of a twenty plus year career, Mr. Coltrane has worked as a sideman to many, recorded noteworthy albums for himself and others and founded a prominent independent record label, RKM.

Born in Long Island, the second son of John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane, Ravi was named after Indian sitar legend Ravi Shankar. He was raised in Los Angeles where his family moved after his father’s death in 1967. His mother, Alice Coltrane, was a significant influence on Ravi and it was he who encouraged Alice to return to performance and the recording studio after a long absence. Subsequently, Ravi produced and played on Alice Coltrane’s powerful ‘Translinear Light’, which was released in 2004.

Ravi has released six albums as a leader. His latest, ‘Spirit Fiction’, was released in June of 2012 for the Blue Note label. Additional credits include performances as well as recordings with Elvin Jones, Terence Blanchard, Kenny Barron, Steve Coleman, McCoy Tyner, Jack DeJohnette, Matt Garrison, Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts, Geri Allen, JoAnne Brackeen, The Blue Note 7, among others. He is a co-leader of the Saxophone Summit with Joe Lovano and Dave Liebman.

Ravi lives in Brooklyn, NY and maintains a fast paced touring, recording, composing and performance schedule. He leads the effort to restore the John Coltrane Home in Dix Hills, Long Island (thecoltranehome.org) and presides over important reissues of his parents’ recordings.

Living legend and longtime Montclair resident Billy Hart has performed with some of the most important jazz musicians in history.

Early on, Hart performed in Washington, D.C. with soul artists such as Otis Redding and Sam and Dave, and then later with Buck Hill and Shirley Horn, and was a sideman with the Montgomery Brothers (1961), Jimmy Smith (1964–1966), and Wes Montgomery (1966–1968). Hart moved to New York in 1968, where he recorded with McCoy Tyner, Wayne Shorter, and Joe Zawinul, and played with Eddie Harris, Pharoah Sanders, and Marian McPartland.

Hart was a member of Herbie Hancock’s sextet (1969–1973), and played with McCoy Tyner (1973–1974), Stan Getz (1974–1977), and Quest (1980s), in addition to extensive freelance playing (including recording with Miles Davis on 1972’s On the Corner).

Billy Hart works steadily and teaches widely. Since the early 1990s Hart spends considerable time at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and is adjunct faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music and Western Michigan University. He also conducts private lessons through The New School and New York University. Hart often contributes to the Stokes Forest Music Camp and the Dworp Summer Jazz Clinic in Belgium.

He leads the Billy Hart Quartet with Mark Turner, Ethan Iverson, and Ben Street, and is a member of the all-star group The Cookers with Eddie Henderson, Cecil McBee, George Cables, Donald Harrison, David Weiss, and Azar Lawrence.

Craig Taborn is one of the most forward-looking, nimble and exciting pianists in jazz today. Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Craig Taborn has been performing piano and electronic music in the jazz, improvisational, and creative music scene for over twenty-five years.

Taborn’s recordings as a leader or co-leader include Daylight Ghosts (2017), Highsmith (2017), Compass Confusion (2020), and a conceptual web-based sound installation entitled 60xSixty (2021). He has also appeared as a sideman on more than 200 recordings and regularly performs at venues and music festivals throughout Europe and the United States.

Craig Taborn is an improvising musician and composer creating singular soundscapes through a virtuosic command of piano and expansive knowledge of musical genres. In performances and recordings as a soloist, bandleader, and sideman, Taborn brings a fearless and sophisticated approach to music making. He draws from musical traditions as varied as traditional and contemporary jazz, contemporary classical, experimental, electronic, rock, metal, and hip-hop. His constant exploration of genre and style informs his own distinct musical intelligence and voice.

With a precise touch and keen sensitivity to an instrument’s capabilities, Taborn elicits distinct textures from the piano and electronic keyboard. He also exploits the percussive qualities of the instruments themselves, and under his hands the piano can sound paper thin, digitally distorted, or as sonorous as a double bass. Taborn’s first solo piano album, Avenging Angel (2011), resonates with haunting and complex patterns that draw on experimental jazz and classical Western and Eastern music. He explores the piano’s full range, melodically, sonically, and spatially.

In his compositions for solo piano and ensembles, Taborn leaves space for improvisation within a focused compositional logic. He creates modular structures that players can move between and combine in a variety of ways while maintaining the compositional integrity of the piece. On Chants (2013), for his trio of piano, bass, and drum, the instrumentalists layer contrasting parts over one another, but the individual units remain distinct.

More recently, Taborn presents a fully improvised, live performance on the recording Shadow Plays (2021). In long episodic suites, he juxtaposes skittering trills, flowing melodies, and sustained distinctive textures to create a sense of tension and intrigue that demands rapt attention. Taborn and collaborators infuse classical idioms with jazz improvisation on the 2023 album hEARoes, featuring Taborn in a trio with viola and double bass. A rare artist of unusual depth and originality, Taborn enhances musical collaborations and composition through his expansive exploration of sound, technique, and instrumentation.

Taborn is currently occupied creating and performing music for solo piano performance (Avenging Angel), piano trio (Craig Taborn Trio), an electronic project (Junk Magic), the Daylight Ghosts Quartet, a piano/drums/electronics duo with Dave King (Heroic Enthusiasts) and a new trio with Tomeka Reid and Ches Smith as well as piano duo collaborations with Vijay Iyer (The Transitory Poems), Kris Davis (Octopus) and Cory Smythe. He is also a member of the instrumental electronic art-pop group Golden Valley is Now and performs frequently on solo electronics.

In 2025 Taborn became the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellow Improvising Musician and Composer.

His conceptual work 60 x Sixty is available worldwide, for free at 60xSixty.com.

Hailed by Pitchfork as “jaw-dropping… one of the finest saxophonists going,” alto saxophonist, composer and educator Rudresh Mahanthappa is widely known as one of the premier voices in jazz of the 21st century. He has over a dozen albums to his credit, including the acclaimed Bird Calls, which topped many critics’ best-of-year lists for 2015 and was hailed by PopMatters as “complex, rhythmically vital, free in spirit while still criss-crossed with mutating structures.” His most recent release, Hero Trio, was considered to be one of the best jazz albums of 2020 by critics and fans alike. Rudresh has been named alto saxophonist of the year for nine of the last eleven years running in Downbeat Magazine’s International Critics’ Polls (2011-2013, 2015-2018, 2020-1), and for five consecutive years by the Jazz Journalists’ Association (2009-2013) and again in 2016. He won alto saxophonist of the year in the 2015-2018 & 2020 JazzTimes Magazine Critics’ Polls and was named the Village Voice’s “Best Jazz Artist” in 2015. He has also received the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, among other honors, and is currently the Anthony H. P. Lee ’79 Director of Jazz at Princeton University.

Born in Trieste, Italy to Indian émigrés in 1971, Mahanthappa was brought up in Boulder, Colorado and gained proficiency playing everything from current pop to Dixieland. He went on to studies at North Texas, Berklee and DePaul University (as well as the Stanford Jazz Workshop) and came to settle in Chicago. Soon after moving to New York in 1997 he formed his own quartet featuring pianist Vijay Iyer. The band recorded an enduring sequence of albums, Black Water, Mother Tongue and Codebook, each highlighting Mahanthappa’s inventive methodologies and deeply personal approach to composition. He and Iyer also formed the duo Raw Materials.

Coming deeper into contact with the Carnatic music of his parents’ native southern India, Mahanthappa partnered in 2008 with fellow altoist Kadri Gopalnath and the Dakshina Ensemble for Kinsmen, garnering wide acclaim. Apti, the first outing by Mahanthappa’s Indo-Pak Coalition (with Pakistani-born Rez Abbasi on guitar and Dan Weiss on tabla), saw release the same year; Agrima followed nine years later and considerably expanded the trio’s sonic ambitions. In 2020, Rudresh released Hero Trio, an album of “covers” paying tribute to his musical heroes followed by the digital EP Animal Crossing in 2022 with the same trio. He also co-led a project celebrating the centenary of Charlie Parker with the blessing of the Parker estate.

Mahanthappa has also worked with Jack DeJohnette, Mark Dresser, Danilo Pérez, Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, the collaborative trios MSG and Mauger, the co-led quintet Dual Identity with fellow altoist Steve Lehman, and another co-led quintet with fellow altoist and Chicago stalwart Bunky Green (Apex). His exploratory guitar-driven quartets on Samdhi and Gamak featured David Gilmore and Dave “Fuze” Fiuczynski, respectively. In 2015 he was commissioned by Ragamala Dance to create Song of the Jasmine for dancers and a hybrid jazz/South Indian ensemble. He was also commissioned by the PRISM Saxophone Quartet to compose a chamber piece, “I Will Not Apologize for My Tone Tonight,” which can be heard on the quartet’s 2015 double-disc release Heritage/Evolution, Volume 1. He was recently commissioned by the AACM’s Great Black Music Ensemble to compose “Finding Our Voice” which premiered in 2021.

Bronx-born bassist, composer and educator Tarik Shah got his first bass at twelve, and at sixteen became the only student of the great Slam Stewart. In 1984, at 21, he joined Betty Carter’s band and toured the world with her. He has since played with Abbey Lincoln, among many others, and with the Duke Ellington Orchestra at a presidential inaugural ball.

Today he lives in New York’s Capital Region, plays the New York City clubs and mentors young musicians. He is at work on a methods book and his first album as a leader, with support from the Jazz Foundation of America and the SmallsLIVE Foundation. In September he played Seed Artists’ celebration of Abbey Lincoln at the Montclair Public Library.