Violinist Gwen Laster began her love for improvising and composing because of her parents’ love of jazz, blues, soul, and classical music played endlessly on the record player and her progressive jazz music educators from Detroit’s public schools. After obtaining two music degrees from the University of Michigan, she moved to New York, where she has pursued a broadly eclectic career as a virtuoso violinist with exquisite taste and as an adventurous composer, arranger, and orchestrator. She has played with musicians in all genres, include such disparate artists as Andrea Bocelli, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, Natalie Cole, Anthony Braxton, and the Sun Ra Arkestra, while also working on also extend to Broadway. As the founder of the Creative Strings Improvisers Ensemble (CSIE), she has created programs which promote self-expression through improvisation. Her sensitivity to global music informs her workshops and master classes across the U.S. Her newest recording Blue Lotus is performed by New MUSE4tet, an improvisational string quartet whose original works promote social activism.

Violist Melanie Dyer performs and composes in creative, improvised and through-composed music spheres. She trained with William Lincer (Principal Violist, New York Philharmonic), Lee Yeingst (Principal Violist, Colorado Symphony Orchestra), John Jake Kella (NY Metropolitan Opera) and Naomi Fellows (Colorado Symphony Orchestra); and studied viola performance at the LaMont School of Music/University of Denver. In 2011 she founded WeFreeStrings, an improvising string/rhythm collective rooted in improvised music in 2011. ​From 2004 – 2013, under her Bb Universe banner and in collaboration with the multi-generational, multi-ethnic Scientific Soul Sessions collective, Melanie’s Harlem home became the scene of underground public performances by this group and other large and small music ensembles. Monthly and semi-monthly events brought cultural luminaries, emerging artists, social and environmental activists, working and under-employed people together. Her wide range of collaborations include the Sun Ra Arkestra, Dead Lecturers, Baba Andrew Lamb, Gwen Laster’s New Muse 4tet, William Parker, and Jason Kao Hwang’s Myths of Origin. WeFreeStrings has released Fulfillment, and this year’s Love in The Form of Sacred Outrage and received project support from New Music USA, Chamber Music America, and the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation. A versatile artist, Melanie’s literary work appears in Gap-toothed Girlfriends: The Third Act anthology; her creative work also involves visual art including sculpture, works on canvas, textiles, and assemblage.

Cellist Alex Waterman is a composer, performer, producer, and scholar, exploring how social bodies can live and interact with one another in more musical ways. He has created a diverse body of works including sound installations, television operas, film and video works, exhibitions, amateur choral works, radio and film scores, and solo performances as a cellist, electronic musician, and storyteller. His installation works, films and music productions have been exhibited at the ICA London, The Kitchen, the Serpentine London, Kunstverein Amsterdam, the Rotterdam Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, the St. Louis Museum, and the Whitney Museum and elsewhere.  Waterman has taught at Bard College (MFA program), NYU, Bloomfield College, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University and currently teaches at Ramapo College of New Jersey.

Andrew Drury is a drummer, improviser, composer, and bandleader as well as a presenter, producer, educator, and a pioneer of extended techniques for percussion. Rooted in a fascination for Jazz and African-diasporic creativity that began in childhood, and further inspired by a nearly decade-long mentorship with the drummer Ed Blackwell. Drury performs as a soloist, leads the quartet Content Provider, the percussion ensemble The Forest, large ensembles, and produces audio and video work. He has performed in 30 countries and on nearly 80 recordings. He has presented over 200 concerts (with excellent soup) in his Soup & Sound music series in his home in Brooklyn and in neighborhoods around Brooklyn and co-founded and runs the non-profit organization, Continuum Culture & Arts. He has given masterclasses in 20 universities on three continents, and has led over 1,500 workshops in schools, prisons, museums, homeless shelters, shelters for battered women, with Kurdish refugees in Germany, on Indian reservations (including the Oneida Nation where he was artist-in-residence for six months in 2000) and in remote villages in Guatemala and Nicaragua. His work has consistently received critical acclaim throughout his career. He has played with Kris Davis, Mark Dresser, Peter Evans, Satoko Fujii, Charles Gayle, Craig Harris, Wayne Horvitz, Earl Howard, Howard Johnson, Eyvind Kang, Ku-umba Frank Lacy, Annea Lockwood, Jessica Lurie, Myra Melford, Butch Morris, Aruán Ortiz, Jay Rodriguez, Tomeka Reid, Stephanie Richards, Roswell Rudd, Elliott Sharp, Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Swell, John Tchicai and Nate Wooley.