Swing Into The Holidays With Live Jazz On MTPR

Erica von Kleist graduated from Julliard in 2004 with a jazz degree, and spent the next ten years in New York City working as a pianist, saxophonist and flautist, a bandleader, a theater music director, a composer, and an arranger. She collaborated with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra,  Chris Potter, Broadway star Eric Michael Krop, the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, Rufus Reid, and Anne Hampton Callaway, among many others.

For more than three decades, New York jazz drummer, composer, bandleader and teacher Allison Miller has been merrily improvising her way into new musical genres and projects. Miller, whom the DownBeat Magazine Critics' Poll named "Rising Star Drummer" and "Top 20 Jazz Drummer," is the driving force behind albums by Natalie Merchant, Brandi Carlile, Ani DiFranco, Joey Arias, Pino Daniele, Erin McKeown and many others.

Globe-trotting composer and pianist Amina Figarova’s career path has taken her from classical piano studies in Baku, Azerbaijan to jazz at the Rotterdam Conservatory and Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Today, she tours almost constantly from her home base in Manhattan, still managing to record 13 albums since 1994.

“It has always been a political act, a practice in strength and defiance, to be a woman and a bandleader, a female electric guitarist and composer, who puts out her own albums and manages her own career..."

Those are the words of Leni Stern, German-born, New York-based electric guitarist, singer and composer.

Just two years after he'd taken up the bass guitar, sixteen-year-old Nathan East found himself on the road with Barry White. The next time the phone rang, Quincy Jones was on the line. The calls kept coming, and for more than forty years, East has been holding down the bass on hit songs with Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Michael Jackson, Phil Collins, Whitney Houston, Beyoncé, Barbra Streisand, Stevie Wonder, and Daft Punk.