Duke Ellington influenced millions of people both around the world and at home. He gave American music its own sound for the first time. In his fifty year career, he played over 20,000 performances in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East as well as Asia.

Simply put, Ellington transcends boundaries and fills the world with a treasure trove of music that renews itself through every generation of fans and music-lovers. His legacy continues to live onand will endure for generations to come. Winton Marsalis said it best when he said "His music sounds like America." Because of the unmatched artistic heights to which he soared, no one deserved the phrase “beyond category” more than Ellington, for it aptly describes his life as well. He was most certainly one of a kind that maintained a llifestyle with universal appeal which transcended countless boundaries.

Duke Ellington is best remembered for the over 3000 songs that he composed during his lifetime. His best known titles include; "It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got That Swing", "Sophisticated Lady", "Mood Indigo", “Solitude", "In a Mellotone",and "Satin Doll". The most amazing part about Ellington was the most creative while he was on the road. It was during this time when he wrote his most famous piece, "Mood Indigo"which brought him world wide fame.

When asked what inspired him to write, Ellington replied, "My men and my race are the inspiration of my work. I try to catch the character and mood and feeling of my people".

Duke Ellington's popular compositions set the bar for generations of brilliant jazz, pop, theatre and soundtrack composers to come. While these compositions guarantee his greatness, whatmakes Duke an iconoclastic genius, and an unparalleled visionary, what has granted him immortality are his extended suites. From 1943's Black, Brown and Beige to 1972's The Uwis Suite, Duke used the suite format to give his jazz songs a far more empowering meaning, resonance and purpose: to exalt, mythologize and re-contextualize the African-American experience on a grand scale.

Duke Ellington was partial to giving brief verbal accounts of the moods his songs captured. Reading those accounts is like looking deep into the background of an old photo of New York and noticing the lost and almost unaccountable details that gave the city its character during Ellington's heyday, which began in 1927 when his band made the Cotton Club its home.''The memory of things gone,'' Ellington once said, ''is important to a jazz musician,'' and the stories he sometimes told about his songs are the record of those things gone. But what is gone returns, its pulse kicking, when Ellington's music plays, and never mind what past it is, for the music itself still carries us forward today.

Duke Ellington was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1966. He was later awarded several other prizes, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969, and the Legion of Honor by France in 1973, the highest civilian honors in each country. He died of lung cancer and pneumonia on May 24, 1974, a month after his 75th birthday, and is buried in theBronx, in New York City. At his funeral attendedby over 12,000 people at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Ella Fitzgerald summed up the occasion, "It's a very sad day...A genius has passed."

“I called the great French violinist Jean-Luc Ponty and I said ‘So, who’s the new cat? Who’s got the stuff? And he said Zach Brock.”

— Stanley Clarke, virtuoso bassist & jazz legend

“…not only is he my favorite violinist in the world but he’s also one of my favorite musicians, period.”

— Michael League, founder/bassist of Snarky Puppy

Violinist Zach Brock is a sought-after soloist, sideman, and educator, as well as a multi Grammy Award-winning member of the contemporary jazz band Snarky Puppy. Born to a musical family in Lexington, KY, Zach began studying violin at the age of four and was performing publicly by the age of six. Zach’s improvisational skills were honed in the rich Chicago jazz scene while studying classical violin at Northwestern University. He released his debut album, Zach Brock & The Coffee Achievers, in 2003. Two years and two records later he was invited to perform at Carnegie Hall by trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas. Zach joined the band of legendary bassist Stanley Clarke in 2007 and that same year he relocated to Brooklyn. From 2010 to 2012 Zach led a chord-less trio of violin, bass and drums called The Magic Number and since 2012 he has released three albums on Criss Cross Jazz, as well as two co-led projects with renowned pianist Phil Markowitz. In 2017 Zach formed a new “chord-less” trio with Matt Ulery and Jon Deitemyer. Their collective 2019 album Wonderment garnered rave reviews and inclusion in the “Best of 2019” lists by Downbeat and Jazziz Magazines.

Zach is most widely recognized through his sixteen years of touring and recording with the genre-bending supergroup Snarky Puppy. Since his first appearance on Snarky’s 2008 on Bring Us The Bright, Zach has appeared on seven subsequent recordings including the 2017 Grammy Award-winning album Culcha Vulcha, 2019’s Immigrance, the 2021 Grammy Award-winning Live At The Royal Albert Hall, and the 2023 Grammy-award winning album Empire Central (to which he contributed his song “Honiara''). In February 2023 Zach performed with legendary guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel at the GroundUP Festival in Miami as part of Kurt’s Caipi Band. In November ‘23 GroundUP Records released Drawing Songs, the debut recording by “Brock, Lanzetti, Ogawa,” a new co-led trio with fellow Snarky Puppy members Bob Lanzetti and Keita Ogawa.

A passionate educator, Zach has coached hundreds of musicians through workshops for The 92nd Street Y and Carnegie Hall in NYC, masterclasses at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland and the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, and as a five-year “Artist In Residence” at Temple University in Philadelphia.

His eleventh solo album, the Grammy-nominated Dirty Mindz featuring Eric Harland, Mark Lettieri, Justin Stanton, and Jonathan Maron, was released in 2022 on GroundUP Records. Zach's latest collaborative album with fellow Snarky Puppy bandmates Bob Lanzetti and Keita Ogawa, the Grammy-nominated album Drawing Songs, was released in November 2023.

Phil Markowitz, is forty year veteran of the International Jazz scene and is dedicated to realizing the full potential of improvisational music within the jazz idiom. He performs original compositions, which range from hard-cutting chromaticism to the most lyrical post-romantic ballads. Inventive, virtuostic, and accessible, Markowitz presents a forward-looking vision for contemporary music. His recordings as leader include “Perputity” on Dottime Records, “Catalysis” on Sunnyside Records, "Taxi Ride" (which features an incredible reunion with his lifelong friend, Toots Thielemans), "In the Woods", "Sno Peas", with Eddie Gomez and Al Foster and "Restless Dreams" (with vibraphonist Joe Locke).

Mr. Markowitz leads his own trio, and a quartet and duo with violinist Zach Brock, and is the pianist in the all-star group "Saxophone Summit" (David Liebman, Joe Lovano and Greg Osby and Billy Hart). His credentials span a cornucopia of jazz; from the traditional to the avant-garde; from his early associations with Chet Baker and Toots Thielemans, through his multi decade affiliations with Bob Mintzer and David Liebman.

In 1979, he joined Chet Baker's band. That four-year association yielded such recordings as "Broken Wing", "Live at Nick's Place", "Two A Day", and "Live at Chateauvalion". Phil has also performed and/or recorded with Mel Lewis, Marion McPartland, Phil Woods, Ravi Coltrane, Michael Brecker, Lionel Hampton, Nick Brignola, Joe Chambers, Miroslav Vitous, and Joe Williams. Phil has a long association with Bob Mintzer and was the pianist on 15 big band and small group recordings including "In The Moment", "Live at MCG", the Grammy Award-winning "Homage to Count Basie", "Quality Time", "Latin in Manhattan", and "Big Band Trane".

Phil's notoriety as a composer came in the late 1970's when he was playing in a NYC club with legendary jazz harmonica player, Toots Thielemans As they were playing Phil's composition, "Sno' Peas", pianist Bill Evans walked in, loved the song, and asked Toots to bring it to their upcoming recording session. Evans' and Thielemans' subsequent recording of "Sno' Peas" on the classic Grammy-nominated album, "Affinity", put Markowitz on the map as a venerable jazz composer.

For the past 27 years Phil has been playing, touring, and recording with NEA saxophone master Dave Liebman. Phil has served as pianist, composer, and/or producer with the quintet on "New Vista", "Voyage", "Return of the Tenor", "Songs for My Daughter", "Miles Away", "Turn It Around”, and two duo albums, "But Beautiful" and "Manhattan Dialogues", which was recorded in Greenfield Hall at the Manhattan School of Music. The all-star group “Saxophone Summit” has released 4 recordings including "Gathering of the Spirits", “Seraphic Light”, “Visitation”, “Compassion- The Music of John Coltrane”, and tours regularly in the US and Europe.

Phil has been artist in residence in major conservatories and universities throughout the world including the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, the Stockholm Conservatory of Music, North Carolina School for the Arts, Oberlin Conservatory. His academic base is the Manhattan School of Music, where he is a professor in the graduate and doctoral divisions.

Phil has received endowments and multiple grants from The Howard Foundation, Chamber Music America-The Doris Duke Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and The New York Foundation for the Arts.