The Team

Arturo O’Farrill
pianist and composer

GRAMMY-award winning pianist, composer and educator Arturo O’Farrill — leader of the “first family of Afro-Cuban Jazz” (The New York Times)—was born in Mexico and grew up in New York City. Son of the late, great composer Chico O’Farrill, Mr. O’Farrill was educated at the Manhattan School of Music, Brooklyn College Conservatory and the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College. He played piano in Carla Bley’s Big Band from 1979 through 1983 and earned a reputation as a soloist in groups led by Dizzy Gillespie, Steve Turre, Freddy Cole, Lester Bowie, Wynton Marsalis and Harry Belafonte. In 2002, he established the GRAMMY-winning Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra (ALJO) in order to bring the vital musical traditions of Afro Latin jazz to a wider audience, and to expand the contemporary Latin jazz big band repertoire through commissions to artists across a wide stylistic and geographic range. Mr. O’Farrill is Professor of Global Jazz Studies and Music at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.

Martin Bresnick
composer

Music by Martin Bresnick brings together minimalist, repetitive gestures with a harmonic palette encompassing highly chromatic sounds, consonant harmonies, and raw power reminiscent of rock. In addition to having received many prizes and commissions, including the first Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Rome Prize, The Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Koussevitzky Commission, Mr. Bresnick is recognized as an influential teacher of composition. His music has been performed by the National Symphony, Chicago Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, City of London Chamber Orchestra, Orquestra Sinfonica do Estado de Sao Paulo, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Izumi Sinfonietta Osaka, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; Sonor; Da Capo Chamber Players; Speculum Musicae; Bang on A Can All Stars; Nash Ensemble; MusicWorks!; Zeitgeist; and Left Coast Ensemble. Mr. Bresnick is the Charles T. Wilson Professor in the Practice of Composition at the Yale University School of Music.

George Lewis
composer

George Lewis’s work in chamber, orchestra, opera, and improvisative forms, as well as interactive computer music and installations, is documented on more than 150 recordings, as presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Dal Niente, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Talea Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Musikfabrik, Mivos Quartet, London Sinfonietta, Spektral Quartet, and others. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Lewis’s other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), and the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019). A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis is the author of A Power Stronger Than Itself:  The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press 2008), and co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016). Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University and holds honorary degrees from the University of Edinburgh, New College of Florida, and Harvard University. His music is published by Edition Peters. 

Juri Seo
composer

Juri Seo is a composer and pianist whose music encompasses extreme contrast and complexity while remaining unified and fluid. She merges an expanded timbral palette and unorthodox approach to structure with a deep love of functional tonality, counterpoint, and classical form. Her composition honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress, a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship, Copland House Residency Award, and the Otto Eckstein Fellowship from Tanglewood. She has received commissions from Fromm Foundation, Barlow Endowment, Tanglewood Music Center, the 21st Century Piano Commission Competition from the University of Illinois, and the Renée B. Fisher Piano Competition. Her debut album “Mostly Piano” was released by Innova Recordings in 2017. Ms. Seo is an Assistant Professor of Music at Princeton University.