Nathan Wouters (°1989) was born into a musical family. After starting out on violin, he switched to the double bass at the age of eleven,  attending classical bass lessons at the Academy for Music, Drama and Dance in Merksem under the guidance of Lode Leire. As well as being active in the Orchestra of Jeunesses Musicales Antwerp directed by Ivo Venkov, he also started to develop an interest in other musical genres.  In 2004, he won the 1st price in the “Music Live competition” organized by Jeunesses Musicales Flanders with fellow improvisers Seppe Gebruers and Jakob Warmenbol. This trio proved to be a valuable learning school in the field of improvised music for them.

Although interested in both classical and improvised music, Nathan started his education at the jazz department of the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp with Piet Verbist and Nicolas Thys, never losing track of his classical studies. 
In 2009 he received the 'Oranjebeurs’ granted by The Dutch Community Antwerp.
After an inspiring meeting with Swedish bass player and pedagogue Anders Jormin, Nathan got the chance to study his last year with him at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden).

Active in a variety of bands, Nathan participated in projects such as: Machtelinckx/Badenhorst/Jensson/Wouters, Book Of Air VVOLK, Book of Air Fieldtone, MikMäâk, Sgt. Fuzzy, Wout Gooris Trio, Chasing Penguins, Teun Verbruggen Quartet, etc…

His personal development as an instrumentalist and composer is displayed in the collaborative project [ˈkɑːmos] with Finnish Soprano Aino Peltomaa, as well as in his solo appearances and solo recordings. These settings create an ideal environment for him to explore and work with live effect processing, which has been part of his musical vocabulary since his teens.

As a in demand sideman, Nathan had the chance to work with musicians such as: Mark Turner, Dave Douglas, Hilmar Jensson, Aki Takase, Rudi Mahall, Kris Davis, Marc Ducret, Hayden Chisholm, Alexi Tuomarila, John Ruocco, Kurt Van Herck, Dré Pallemaerts, Benoît Delbecq, Bert Joris, Erwin Vann, Ben Sluijs, Jeroen Van Herzeele, Guillaume Orti, Bo Van der Werf, Joachim Badenhorst, Haakon Aase, Nicola Andrioli, Erik Vermeulen, Jozef Dumoulin, Teun Verbruggen, Giovanni Barcella, Marek Patrman, Erik Thielemans, Toma Gouband,  William Hooker, … 
Besides performing at the main Belgian stages he also performed in China, Chili, Mexico, Japan, Croatia, Finland, Ukraine, Sweden, United Kingdom, Finland, Germany, France, Portugal, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and Italy.

Since 2016 Nathan is associated as a teacher at the jazz departement of the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp.

Belgian trombonist and composer of jazz and world-music

Jack Herscowitz is a Chicago-based composer, improviser, and sound artist working across experimental music and art practices. Described as “the slow descent of the sun at twilight” (A Closer Listen), his current work centers around commitment to unadorned musical materials to reveal their complexities, exorcisms of mass-produced tech, interruptions which peel back the curtains on cultural practices of art making, noise as an activation of the full body, and relational non-hierarchical webs of listening. His practice spans instrumental composition, dramaturgy, electroacoustic improvisation, installation, landscape film, object performance, sampling, text, and communal sound making.

New York City based composer, pianist and video artist Brian Mark has been hailed as an "attractive and intelligible" artist (Boston Musical Intelligencer), whose work is "compelling" (London Jazz News), and "preserves the vibrancy and relevance of contemporary art music" (New York Examiner). The American Composers Forum esteemed Brian as an "intelligent, modern composer who employs many media elements and does so with marked idiosyncrasy and depth”, and his concert programming has recently been described as “a fluid approach to presenting new music in fresh contexts and juxtapositions” (The New Yorker).

Brian’s music have been performed by many notable ensembles, such as the BBC Singers, Psappha Ensemble, Chelsea Symphony, Ensemble Signal, Atlas Ensemble, MikroEnsemble, Brave New Works, Choral Chameleon, both the Ligeti and Esterhazy String Quartets, Juventas Ensemble, Dither Quartet, members of the London Symphony Orchestra, among many others. His works have been presented around the world in festivals such as Bang on a Can, MATA, Oregon Bach Festival, London Contemporary Music Festival, Atlas Festival, Spitalfields Music Festival, i=u, June in Buffalo, Tutti Festival, the Bowdoin International Music Festival, and the highSCORE Festival.

Brian has recently been awarded a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council.  He has also received multiple awards and grants from the Jerome Composers Commissioning Program/Jerome Fund, New Music USA, the Grammy Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, ASCAP and SCI, New London Singers, Ross McKee Foundation, Florence Gould Michael Iovenko Memorial Fellowship, the BMI Henry Warren Film Scoring Award, and was very highly commended for the 2016 Alan Bush Prize.  He has been featured as a composer-in-residence with the Chelsea Symphony, the Bizarre Noir Theatre Company, and was awarded multiple artist residencies at the I-Park Artists’ Enclave, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Ucross Foundation.  He has received an Honorable Mention from the 2015 American Prize in Orchestral Composition, and recently was awarded one of the top ten prizes from Mozaik’s Philanthropy’s “Future Art Awards” Competition for works created in response to COVID-19.  In 2019 Brian also received a fellowship to study Korean Music at the National Gugak Centre in Seoul.   

As a composer for film, his music for the Independent Short Film Misunderstood, directed by Pablo Herrán de Viu, was exhibited at the 2009 Screen Loud Film Festival in New York City, and the 2010 Festival Internacional de Cine Pobre de Humberto Solás in Habana City, Cuba. His collaborative work Sublime Oasis, commissioned by the East London Dance Company, was showcased at the 2012 Spitalfields Hidden Gems Dance Festival.

From 2009-2011 Brian was the Co-Artistic Director and Founder for DETOUR, a composer collective and New Music Ensemble, which was featured as “one the top five new music events of 2011" from New York’s Classical WQXR. He has also collaborated with UK’s record label Nonclassical as a concert curator, featuring emerging composers and artists throughout London and abroad. In addition, he was appointed as an Associate Member for the London Symphony Orchestra’s Composer Soundhub Scheme from 2015-2017, which culminated of his first video installation performance comprising of members from the LSO.  His curated concert series Ensemble in Process made its debut at the Iklectik Creative Space in Southeast London on 15 May, 2017.

Brian had completed his PhD at the Royal Academy of Music, studying with Gary Carpenter.  He is also a graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Berklee College of Music, and Boston University.  He has received a graduate certificate in film scoring from the University of Southern California, and has also studied with Philip Cashian, Samuel Adler, David Conte, David Garner, James Russell Smith, and Howard Frazin.

Tim *Daemen is following