ALEX HARDING  was born in Detroit and studied music in his early years with Yusef Lateef, Beans Bows and Herbie Williams, and had a chance to play with Wynton Marsalis and Donald Byrd while still in high school. In 1998, Alex was part of the Sun Ra All-Star Project that premiered at the North Sea Jazz Festival and the Montreux-Detroit Jazz Festival and has performed with the late Roy Hargrove Big Band and with Aretha Franklin. The critics have hailed him as “the new voice on baritone saxophone, the carrier of the great legacy of Harry Carney, Pepper Adams and Hamiet Bluiett.” Alex Harding has released several albums as a leader garnering glowing reviews and appeared as guest on more than 40 albums. In the October ’97 issue of Jazz Times, the review of Hamiet Bluiett’s Baritone Band said that “Alex Harding attacked the music with steamroller momentum and uncommon ferocity…it was sheer fireworks.” 

Based in New York City, pianist & composer LUCIAN BAN was raised in a small village in northwest Transylvania, in the region where Bartok “did his most extensive research and collecting of folk songs” and grew up listening to both traditional and classical music. Desire to get closer to the source of jazz brought him to the US, and since moving from Romania to New York in 1999 his ensembles have included many of New York’s finest players. Ban has “ricocheted among orthodox post bop, free jazz, and inspired hybrids—including his inventive arrangements of the music of Romanian composer George Enesco” on his all star octet album Enesco Re-imagined (Sunnyside, 2009) co-lead with bassist John Hébert. In 2013 Ban’s quartet Elevation released their first album, the “blustery Mystery (Sunnyside), where the searing, post-Coltrane blowing of tenor saxophonist Abraham Burton and the charged rhythms of drummer Eric McPherson and bassist John Hebert cut against the pianist’s controlled, abstruse austerity.”