Cécile McLorin Salvant was born to a French mother and a Haitian father in Miami, Florida. She started classical piano studies at age five and began singing in a children’s choir three years later. Early on, she developed an interest in classical voice.

In 2007, Salvant moved to Aix-en-Provence, France, to study law, as well as classical and baroque voice at the Darius Milhaud Conservatory. It was in Aix-en-Provence, with reed player and teacher Jean-François Bonnel, that she started learning about jazz and sang with her first band. In 2009, after a series of concerts in Paris, she recorded her first album, Cécile, with Bonnel’s Paris Quintet. A year later, she won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Vocals Competition.

In 2014, Salvant’s second album, WomanChild, was nominated for a Grammy Award. Her third and fourth albums—For One to Love and Dreams and Daggers, respectively—both won Grammy Awards in the Best Jazz Vocal Album category. The Window, released in the fall of 2018, was recorded with pianist Sullivan Fortner and featured tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana, earning Salvant her third Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album.

Ogresse is Salvant’s new musical journey. With its dark and romantic “fairytale-like” story, Ogresse is a delightfully audacious addition to her increasingly eclectic body of work.

Salvant frequently makes music with Aaron Diehl, Paul Sikivie, and Kyle Poole. She has collaborated with Archie Shepp, Wynton Marsalis, John Clayton, Jeff Hamilton, Renee Rosnes, Bill Charlap, Fred Hersch, Jacky Terrasson, and Darcy James Argue.

Renee Rosnes is one of the premier jazz pianists and composers of her generation. Upon moving to New York City from Vancouver, Canada, she quickly established a reputation of high regard, touring and recording with such masters as Joe Henderson, Wayne Shorter, Bobby Hutcherson, J. J. Johnson, and James Moody. She was a charter member of the all-star SFJAZZ Collective, with whom she toured for six years.

Rosnes has released 17 recordings and appeared on many others. In 2016, Written in the Rocks was named one of the best albums of the year by The Nation and also earned her a fifth JUNO Award. Rosnes’s most recent release, Beloved of the Sky, draws inspiration from Canadian painter Emily Carr, and features Chris Potter, Steve Nelson, Peter Washington, and Lenny White.

Throughout her 30-year career, Rosnes has collaborated with a diverse range of artists, such as Jack DeJohnette, Zakir Hussain, Christian McBride, Chris Potter, Renée Fleming, and Nicholas Payton. Her works have been performed and recorded by J. J. Johnson, Phil Woods, Michael Dease, and the Danish Radio Big Band, among others.

From 2008 to 2010, Rosnes was the host of The Jazz Profiles, an interview series produced by CBC-Radio. She has also contributed two cover-story interviews to JazzTimes—one with Wayne Shorter and the other with Geri Allen.

Rosnes is a member of bassist Ron Carter’s Quartet and performs with her husband, acclaimed pianist Bill Charlap. The couple released Double Portrait in 2010 and made their New York City concert debut in Zankel Hall the following year. The piano duo was also featured on the 2016 Grammy-winning album The Silver Lining: The Songs of Jerome Kern with Tony Bennett.

Anat Cohen was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, and began clarinet studies at age 12. She completed her mandatory Israeli military service duty from 1993 to 1995, playing tenor saxophone in the Israeli Air Force Band.

Through the World Scholarship Tour, Cohen attended the Berklee College of Music. She then spent a decade with Sherrie Maricle’s DIVA Jazz Orchestra, and has worked with the Choro Ensemble, Duduka Da Fonseca’s Samba Jazz Quintet, and David Ostwald’s Gully Low Jazz Band.

In 2009, Cohen became the first Israeli to headline at the Village Vanguard and paid tribute to Benny Goodman with the 2010 release Clarinetwork: Live at the Village Vanguard.

Anat has recorded four albums as part of the 3 Cohens trio with her brothers, saxophonist Yuval and trumpeter Avishai.

She served as music director for the Newport Jazz Festival Now 60! US tour in 2014, and toured with pianist Fred Hersch, as well as with Omara Portuondo. Cohen and Hersch released Live in Healdsburg in 2018.

The Anat Cohen Tentet’s debut release, Happy Song (2017) was arranged and conducted by Cohen’s musical partner and producer, Oded Lev-Ari. Earlier in 2017, she released Outra Coisa: The Music of Moacir Santos and Rosa Dos Ventos—both recorded in Rio de Janeiro and Brasília, and both receiving Grammy Award nominations.

The Tentet released Triple Helix in 2019. The album’s centerpiece is a three-movement concerto composed by Lev-Ari, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall and Chicago’s Symphony Center. It was recently nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album category.

Cohen has taught at Stanford University; Oberlin College; Michigan State University; University of California, San Diego; the Centrum Choro Workshop; and California Brazil Camp.

Cohen has been named Clarinetist of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association every year since 2007.

Melissa Aldana was born in Santiago, Chile. She began playing the saxophone at age six, under the influence and tutelage of her father, Marcos Aldana, who is also a professional saxophonist. Aldana began with alto saxophone, influenced by artists such as Charlie Parker, Cannonball Adderley, and Michael Brecker, and switched to tenor upon first hearing the music of Sonny Rollins.

She performed in Santiago jazz clubs in her early teens and was invited by pianist Danilo Pérez to play at the Panama Jazz Festival in 2005.

Aldana attended Berklee College of Music, from which she graduated in 2009. She recorded her first album in 2010, Free Fall, and her second album, Second Cycle, was released in 2012. In 2013, she became the first female and the first South American musician to win the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition, in which her father had been a semi-finalist in 1991.

On her newly released album Visions, Aldana connects her work to the legacy of Latina artists who have come before her, creating a pathway for her own expression. Inspired by the life and works of Frida Kahlo, Aldana creates a parallel between her experiences as a female saxophone player in a male-dominated community and Kahlo’s experiences as a female visual artist. The track “Elsewhere” has been nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Improvised Jazz Solo category.

Aldana tours extensively as a leader around the world, and is an in-demand clinician and educator.

Ingrid Jensen has been hailed as one of the most gifted trumpeters of her generation and is a sought-after teacher, collaborator, and soloist.

After graduating from Berklee College of Music in 1989, Jensen became the youngest professor in the history of the Bruckner Conservatory in Linz, Austria. She recorded three albums for Enja Records in the 1990s and became one of the most in-demand trumpet players on the global jazz scene.

She has been a member of the innovative jazz orchestras of Maria Schneider (1994–2012) and Darcy James Argue (2002–present), and has performed with a cast of jazz legends who range from Clark Terry to Esperanza Spalding. Jensen performed alongside British R&B artist Corinne Bailey Rae on Saturday Night Live and recorded with Canadian pop icon Sarah McLachlan. More recently, she has been performing with Grammy winner Terri Lyne Carrington.

One of Jensen’s most frequent and closest collaborators is her sister, saxophonist and composer Christine Jensen. She is a featured soloist on the Christine Jensen Jazz Orchestra’s Juno Award–winning album Treelines (2010) and its successor, Habitat (2013). The sisters released a small group recording entitled Infinitude in 2016.

As a dedicated jazz educator, Jensen has taught at the University of Michigan and Peabody Conservatory; performed and lectured as a guest artist with the Thelonious Monk Institute High School group featuring Herbie Hancock; and performed and taught at the Centrum Jazz Workshop, Brubeck Institute, Banff Centre Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music, Stanford Jazz Camp, and Geri Allen Jazz Camp for young women.

Jensen won the Carmine Caruso International Jazz Trumpet Solo Competition in 1995 and recently served as artist-in-residence at the prestigious Monterey Jazz Festival.

Jensen’s latest album, Invisible Sounds, honors the late Kenny Wheeler. Earlier this year, she was hailed by the Jazz Journalists Association as 2019’s Trumpeter of the Year.

Noriko Ueda is originally from Hyogo, Japan. Her interest in music began early in her life, studying classical piano at the age of four. At 16, she began playing the electric bass and two years later began her career with the upright bass.

Ueda was the B.E.S.T. scholarship recipient for the Berklee College of Music, where she majored in jazz composition and from which she graduated in 1997. She then relocated to New York City and has since become an in-demand player with such legendary groups such as the Frank Wess Quintet and his Nonet, the Ted Rosenthal Trio, Sherrie Maricle’s DIVA Jazz Orchestra, Five Play, Grady Tate’s band, and Harry Whitaker’s band, as well as with Marion Cowings, Makoto Ozone, and Terumasa Hino.

Other career highlights to date include leading her own small groups and her big band, the Noriko Ueda Jazz Orchestra, and recording her first trio album, Debut in 2015 with pianist Ted Rosenthal and drummer Quincy Davis. She toured Japan with the Ted Rosenthal Trio for 11 consecutive years (2006–2017), and performed on his album Out of this World, which reached the top of the national jazz radio charts in 2011.

Ueda was featured on a Japanese TV documentary called Gutto Chikyu-bin, which won her the third annual BMI Foundation / Charlie Parker Jazz Composition Prize for the big-band piece “Castle in the North.”

Drummer, composer, and teacher Allison Miller has been named one of the “Top 20 Jazz Drummers” in the DownBeat Critics Poll, and her composition “Otis Was a Polar Bear” is one of NPR’s “200 Greatest Songs by 21st Century Women.” Miller served as an artist-in-residence at the 2019 Monterey Jazz Festival and is the first recipient of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s Commissioning Grant.

Miller’s band Boom Tic Boom—featuring pianist Myra Melford, violinist Jenny Scheinman, clarinetist Ben Goldberg, cornetist Kirk Knuffke, and bassist Todd Sickafoose—is currently celebrating its 10th anniversary with the release of Glitter Wolf. Previous releases include 5am Stroll, Boom Tic Boom, Live at Willisau, No Morphine No Lilies, and Otis Was a Polar Bear.

Miller co-directs Parlour Game with Jenny Scheinman and Science Fair with Carmen Staaf. She is also musical director for Camille A. Brown’s ink, Michelle Dorrance and the American Ballet Theatre’s Dream within a Dream (deferred), Speak with Rachna Nivas and Michelle Dorrance, and And Still You Must Swing with Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards.

As a side musician, Miller has collaborated with Ani DiFranco, Sara Bareilles, Natalie Merchant, Brandi Carlile, and Toshi Reagon, as well as Dr. Lonnie Smith, Patricia Barber, Marty Ehrlich, Myra Melford, Steven Bernstein, and Ben Allison.

Miller is a three-time Jazz Ambassador for the US State Department and has been appointed Arts Envoy to Thailand for her work with Jazz Education Abroad. She is on Yamaha’s Top 30 Clinicians List and teaches at the School of Jazz at The New School and Stanford Jazz Workshop, in addition to being artistic director of Jazz Camp West. Her instructional videos are produced and published by Reverb. In 2008, Miller founded the Walter Salb Memorial Musical Scholarship Foundation in honor of her late teacher and mentor.