have redefined the possibility of the double bass and dramatically expanded its role, whether playing solo or with others. 
Perpetually in demand, he has played with Evan Parker, Roscoe Mitchell, Sunny Murray, Derek Bailey, Joe McPhee, Lol Coxhill, Louis Moholo, Peter Brötzmann, Mulatu Astatke and countless others.

Her most recent project is a Piano Marathon, which she conducts as a single pianist performing only music by women composers for 24 hours non-stop. She is active in Berlin's contemporary music scene and works closely with composers. Her innovative work is supported by various grants and scholarships from Musikfonds Berlin, Deutsche Orchester-Stiftung, Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa, Fonds Darstellende Künste, GVL-Stipendium, the Norwegian Quota Scholarship, the Dwight and Ursula Mamlok Foundation, Käthe-Dorsch - und Agnes-Straub – Stiftung, Cesko-Nemecky fond budoucnosti, inm.

He began playing the piano at the age of eight and studied classical music, while also developing an early interest in reggae. At sixteen, after seeing the legendary pianist Oscar Peterson perform on television, Thomas was inspired to pursue jazz. By 1979, he was performing seriously as an improviser. Over the course of his career, Thomas has collaborated with a wide range of influential musicians, including Mike Cooper, Geoff Hawkins, Lol Coxhill, Tony Oxley, Steve Beresford, Alex Ward, Derek Bailey, Eugene Chadbourne, Jimmy Carl Black, Evan Parker, John Zorn, Joe Gallivan, John Butcher, Okkyung Lee, Bill Dixon, Roy Campbell, Marshall Allen, Moor Mother, Matana Roberts, Wadada Leo Smith, and many others. His current projects include solo piano, Black Top (with Orphy Robinson), Scatter (with Phil Minton, Roger Turner, and Dave Tucker), Shifa (with Rachel Musson and Mark Sanders), Bleyschool (with Tony Orrell and Dom Lash), Ahmed (with Seymour Wright, Joel Grip, and Antonin Gerbal), a duo with Steve Noble, a trio with William Parker and Hamid Drake, a duo with Tyshawn Sorey, and a duo with Mariam Rezaei. In 2014, Thomas received a Composers Award from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. In 2022, he was awarded an unrestricted $25,000 grant from the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation, in recognition of his incomparable artistry and significant contribution to improvised music.

Leonie captures her environment with field recordings, which she uses for radio pieces, sound installations, and instrumental compositions. Part of her work is purely sound-based, however the theme of marginalization has become increasingly present in her radio works. She runs the radio branch of Studio LOOS in The Hague, co-curates On Air - On Site Festival, and co-manages Iranian record label Noise à Noise. Her works have been released through Musica Dispersa (Spain/UK), and Noise á Noise (Iran), Biodiversitàs, Syrphe, and have been physically archived in the British Library.

An early fascination with electronic audio devices from the beginning of the 1970s, in combination with a preference for writing and performing extremely idiosyncratic music, has created a wide range of experimental music and radio productions.
His first solo work, I Can Hear Trumpets? (1980), was produced for VPRO. In 1983, he collaborated with Fluxus artist Willem de Ridder on Portable Vaudeville, presented during the Holland Festival. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Veldman produced numerous experimental radio works as part of FNTC, broadcast internationally. Via his cassette label Exart (1982–1995), he released music and video works under various aliases. Since 2004, he has returned to regular performance and recording, releasing several solo and collaborative albums, including EPoX, Ymuiden, and Manifest Exodus. From 2004 onward, Veldman has worked as a program-maker for Concertzender, serving as coordinator and editor-in-chief of New Music (Crosslinks) from 2009 to January 2025.

The duo improvises freely with a large array of objects, instruments, field recordings and a variety of guitars. Both artists stand for peace. For justice. And have not shied away from addressing topics like the genocide in Gaza in their work. Their set will join the voices of people are ready to fight for a change. Those who gather on meadows and squares. And demonstrate for a better world. For a free Gaza, for stopping the pollution of our environment, for protecting our human rights, for standing up against fascism and for fighting racism. On January 30, 2026, Leonie and Hessel will be part of this storm of protests with a tsunami of uprising sounds, including field recordings of marches and into the archive of Radio LOOS, which gave activists and artists a voice in matters that are essential in our social fabric.

Of course, we demand an end to the brutal genocide and occupation that has been ongoing for much of the last century. Cease Fire is an adventurous, high-energy improvisational jazz project built around the dynamic collaboration between American saxophonist John Dikeman and Serbian drummer Aleksandar Škorić. The duo draws on the raw spirit of free jazz and combines it with intense emotional and spontaneous interplay, often invoking elements from African-American free jazz traditions and European free improvisation. This concert will present them in trio with the idionsyncratic and explosive guitar work of Andy Moor, known for his work with the Ex and Dog Faced Hermans as well as Lean Left and countless other collaborations.

Winner of the Paul Acket Awards (2025) and the Edison Award (2024) for A Self-Strewn Portrait, she has established herself as a driving force in contemporary jazz, creating projects that balance compositional rigor with adventurous improvisation. Her work reflects a distinctive artistic direction, combining structured frameworks with experimental and interdisciplinary approaches, bringing her musical ideas vividly to life. Through her ensembles and collaborations, Sun-Mi fosters spaces where musicians and audiences alike can engage with bold, forward-thinking expressions. Presented at major European festivals and venues, her work continues to shape the modern jazz landscape. Acclaimed by DownBeat as a “strikingly original composer” and by Jazzwise as “absorbing as it is enigmatic,” Sun-Mi’s influence extends beyond performance, advancing creative possibilities and nurturing a culture of collaboration and innovation.

Of course, we demand an end to the brutal genocide and occupation that has been ongoing for much of the last century. Cease Fire is an adventurous, high-energy improvisational jazz project built around the dynamic collaboration between American saxophonist John Dikeman and Serbian drummer Aleksandar Škorić. The duo draws on the raw spirit of free jazz and combines it with intense emotional and spontaneous interplay, often invoking elements from African-American free jazz traditions and European free improvisation. This concert will present them in trio with the idionsyncratic and explosive guitar work of Andy Moor, known for his work with the Ex and Dog Faced Hermans as well as Lean Left and countless other collaborations.

As a singer, performing contemporary opera and concert music, primarily by American composers. Norderval´s solo CD of her works for voice and electronics - Aural Histories - was listed by The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross as one of “Ten Notable Classical Music Recordings of 2012”. Her opera The Trials of Patricia Isasa (2016) won Quebec’s OPUS prize in two categories: best contemporary music and best production of the year. In 2023 Kristin completed a PhD in Artistic Research at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Academy of Opera, where she developed the EVII (Expanded Vocal Improvising Instrument) - a wireless performer-controlled interactive system for vocal processing. Her research “Electrifying Opera, Amplifying Agency” is published on Research Catalogue.

She founded jill sigman/thinkdance in 1998 to think about pressing social issues through the body. Working with things we cast off such as “garbage” and “weeds”, Sigman helps us to re-form connections with the natural world and each other in meaningful and empathic ways. Sigman has created community by building site-specific structures out of waste, dancing in public spaces, and serving tea made of foraged edibles. Her book Ten Huts (Wesleyan University Press) documents that process. In 2016, she developed Body Politic, a program of workshops, trainings, and performance laboratories to ask salient political questions somatically, and in 2022 she initiated a Social Justice Movement Lab for artist-activists. Sigman has been a Gibney Dance Community Action Artist in Residence; a Choreographic Fellow at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography; a Distinguished Guest Artist at the University of San Francisco Performing Arts & Social Justice program; a resident artist at Movement Research (NYC), Guapamacátaro Interdisciplinary Residency in Art and Ecology (Mexico), The Kri Foundation (India), and The Rauschenberg Residency (Florida); a Choreographic Fellow at the Tisch Initiative for Creative Research at New York University; and a Creative Campus Fellow at Wesleyan University. Sigman studied classical ballet, analytic philosophy, and art conservation; she was born and raised on Canarsee land in Brooklyn, New York.

Sigman collects soils from sites charged with multiple struggles. Her movements with them evoke questions about their history and hauntology, climate changes, environmental justice, border conflicts, and lineage. For the Sound Art Festival performance, Sigman and Norderval explore colonial connections between the Netherlands and New York through a physical and sonic encounter with their soils.

Raised in Bolivia within Bolivian and Brazilian families, Ferragutti describes their work as “deeply interwoven in post-colonial justice, the paradox and beauty between grief and celebration, Andean Cosmology as a source of reclamation, resistance and resilience. Embodiment embedded in sonic fabrics while speculating myths through word oracles. I am a neo-mestiza, a spiritual activist, a femme defender and a Moon lover.” Her notable musical collaborators include: Alabaster DePlume, jaimie branch, Ab Baars, Wilbert de Joode, Ben LaMar Gay, Mary Oliver, Paul Koek, and The Paper Ensemble. Along with her partner Frank Rosaly, Ferragutti founded the DIY arts/music community space MOLK FACTORY in Amsterdam in 2017.

Born in Arizona, Rosaly was known for his fifteen years of creative work on the Chicago jazz and improvised music scene before moving to Amsterdam in 2016. His work revolves around the study of folkloric ideology of the Tainos, indigenous to the Caribbean, ritual and trance, as well as eco-centric phenomena such as rhythmic sensibilities of animals, plants and insects. Much of his work takes form as resistance to hegemonic, colonial and capitalist systems. He has been featured on over 175 recordings, and is in constant collaboration. Artists he has worked with include: Fennesz, Joan of Arc, Jeff Parker, Thurston Moore, Nels Cline, Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society, Colin Stetson, Rob Mazurek, Ben LaMar Gay, jaimie branch, and many others. In 2017 he co-founded the DIY arts/music community space MOLK FACTORY with his partner Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti in Amsterdam.

His work explores the intersection of electroacoustic composition, sound installations, and site-specific projects, often engaging with the political and social dimensions of sound. Through his practice, he investigates how sound shapes perception, identity, and collective memory.

A leading figure on the Dutch improv scene for two decades, Hoogland simultaneously honors and dismantles the New Dutch Swing tradition. His diverse collaborations span Senegalese griot music with Mola Sylla, cumbia with Superinca, Ethiopian jazz with Adulis, and West African tours with Zea's Arnold de Boer. He maintains deep ties to Dutch improv history through The Ambush Party, his quartet These Things Happen, LOOT (featuring Ab Baars), and his duo with legendary drummer Han Bennink. His Misha Mengelberg-like intellect explores meta-musical concepts while keeping the music direct and engaging. Beyond performing, Hoogland has pioneered bringing improvised music to new audiences through innovative series like Eddie and the Eagles at OT301, Amsterdam Real Book bicycle tours, and the ABC Doek Festival connecting Amsterdam, Berlin, and Chicago scenes. He's created theater collaborations with De Veenfabriek and others, plus installations including "On The Line," a Mondrian-inspired piece of twelve synchronized record players at Het Gemeente Museum Den Haag. Hoogland teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and jazz at the Conservatory of Amsterdam. He co-directs the DOEK improvisers collective and runs the record label De Platenbakkerij.