Joan Hutton is an educator, performer and composer residing in Minneapolis and originally hailing from Toronto, Canada. She has been a member of the Ancia Saxophone Quartet since 1996, a group that performs and presents educational clinics nationally and internationally. Ancia is featured frequently on National Public Radio’s “Performance Today.” Joan plays saxophones and bass clarinet with the jazz-funk sextet Rare Medium, and composes many of their tunes. Her newest group, the Joan Hutton Jazz Project, was formed early in 2017 to feature her original compositions.

Laura Caviani is a veteran of over two decades of performing, recording and composing. She recently released two albums with her Minneapolis–based trio: Mysterious Thelonious and Confluence. The first celebrates jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk’s centennial, and is hailed by Britt Robson of the Minneapolis Star Tribune as “a masterful blend of… chordal complexity, innate sense of swing, and desire to live up to Monk’s intrepid spirit”. Andrea Canter, of The Jazz Police, says of “Confluence:” “Like the joining of the rivers, the individual artists intertwine musically such that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts– a confluence of melody and harmony.”