Three-time GRAMMY™ Award–winning drummer Ulysses Owens Jr. is recognized as “a drummer who takes a back seat to no one” and “a musician who balances excitement gracefully and shines with innovation,” according to The New York Times.

A performer, producer, educator, and Global Curator; Owens continues to push boundaries within the jazz world and beyond, maintaining an expansive career as a bandleader, collaborator, author, and cultural leader.

Owens has released ten albums as a bandleader and gained international recognition for his performances on GRAMMY Award–winning albums by Kurt Elling and the Christian McBride Big Band. In 2023, he received his third GRAMMY Award for his participation on an album featuring Steven Feifke, Bijon Watson, and the Generation Gap Jazz Orchestra.

His work has been recognized by Rolling Stone, which named Songs of Freedom a “Top Ten Album of 2019,” and by Jazziz, which selected Soul Conversations as a top album in 2021. That release received widespread critical acclaim, extensive playlist placement, and launched a national tour. The Ulysses Owens Jr. Big Band was also named “Rising Star Big Band” by DownBeat in 2022.

Owens has served on the jazz faculty at The Juilliard School for over seven years as small ensemble director. He has also served on Juilliard’s EDIB committee (equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging) and taught workshops through the Alan D. Marks Center for Career Services and Entrepreneurship.

He is the founding artistic director of his family nonprofit organization, Don’t Miss a Beat, which empowers youth through musical theatre and civic engagement at the DMAB Community Arts Center in Jacksonville, Florida.

Owens also joined Drumeo as its inaugural jazz drum instructor and has developed multiple online courses, including 30 Day Jazz Drummer and Jazz Drumming 101. He previously hosted the weekly YouTube series From the Drummer’s Perspective.

Ulysses is expanding his educational reach by launching the Ulysses Owens Jr. Global Intensive Summer Drum Camp in Shanghai and Beijing, China, in August 2026. In partnership with Cashell Music, this initiative offers Chinese drummers the opportunity to study his acclaimed jazz pedagogy while strengthening their alignment with the admission standards of American conservatories and institutions.

There may be no better way to kick off the Christmas season than with Aubrey Logan and her Little Big Band at Parker Jazz Club.

This annual holiday tradition has become one of the highlights of the season, and this year’s celebration promises plenty of new surprises alongside the Christmas favorites you’ve come to love. Aubrey has a knack for taking familiar holiday classics and making them feel fresh, unexpected, and unmistakably her own. Add the rich, swinging sound of the Little Big Band, and you’ve got all the ingredients for an evening filled with laughter, warmth, and holiday spirit.

By the end of Black Friday, the shopping bags are full, the crowds have thinned, and the hustle and bustle can leave us all a little weary. So come settle in with your favorite cocktail, relax with family and friends, and let the music remind you what this season is really about. You’ll hear the Christmas chestnuts you grew up with, discover a few new favorites, and spend an evening that feels like Christmas should—filled with joy, nostalgia, and the simple pleasure of being together.

Whether this has become your annual tradition or your very first Christmas with Aubrey, you’ll leave with a lighter heart, a smile on your face, and the holiday spirit officially underway.

There may be no better way to kick off the Christmas season than with Aubrey Logan and her Little Big Band at Parker Jazz Club.

This annual holiday tradition has become one of the highlights of the season, and this year’s celebration promises plenty of new surprises alongside the Christmas favorites you’ve come to love. Aubrey has a knack for taking familiar holiday classics and making them feel fresh, unexpected, and unmistakably her own. Add the rich, swinging sound of the Little Big Band, and you’ve got all the ingredients for an evening filled with laughter, warmth, and holiday spirit.

By the end of Black Friday, the shopping bags are full, the crowds have thinned, and the hustle and bustle can leave us all a little weary. So come settle in with your favorite cocktail, relax with family and friends, and let the music remind you what this season is really about. You’ll hear the Christmas chestnuts you grew up with, discover a few new favorites, and spend an evening that feels like Christmas should—filled with joy, nostalgia, and the simple pleasure of being together.

Whether this has become your annual tradition or your very first Christmas with Aubrey, you’ll leave with a lighter heart, a smile on your face, and the holiday spirit officially underway.

Musical ambassador and interpreter of “America’s” music, Wycliffe Gordon is one of the world’s most renowned and award-winning jazz trombonists touring today. His signature sound and mastery of the plunger mute have helped solidify his impressive musical career. Wycliffe tours as a soloist and regularly with his quintet headlining at legendary jazz venues and performing arts centers worldwide. In addition, Wycliffe has recorded or been featured on over 300 recordings, has composed and arranged hundreds of compositions, including the theme song for NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and is a very passionate, most sought-after educator.

Jazz Journalists Association named him “Trombonist of the Year” for an unprecedented 15th time in 2022, and Downbeat Critics Poll named Wycliffe “Best Trombone” for six years, (2020, 2018, 2016, 2014, 2013 & 2012). In recent years, Wycliffe was the recipient of the “Louie Award”, the International Trombone Award (which recognizes the highest level of creative and artistic achievement), the Satchmo Award, and the Louis Armstrong Memorial Prize presented by the Swing Jazz Culture Foundation. He is also a past recipient of the ASCAP Foundation Vanguard Award, among others.

In recent months he has performed with Butler University, UNC Greely, Davidson College, Stanford Jazz, at Aaron Davis Concert Hall, Birdland, the Rochester Jazz Festival, Vail Jazz and the Journey of Jazz cruise, to name a few. He has a new Holiday CD coming out next month titled “Holiday Fun” on Arbors Records, and he closes out the year with upcoming performances that include True Blue Jazz, Suncoast Jazz Festival, VA Music Educator’s Assn, Boca Raton Gala, and the Staten Island Jazz Festival.

Gordon is a former veteran member of the Wynton Marsalis Septet, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and has been a featured guest artist on Billy Taylor's "Jazz at the Kennedy Center" Series. Gordon serves as Director of Jazz Studies at Augusta University in Augusta, GA.

Wycliffe Gordon is a Yamaha Performing Artist and has his own line of Wycliffe Gordon Pro Signature Mouthpieces by Pickett Brass, the “Wybrid” Crossover Mouthpiece also by Pickett Brass, and a new plunger mute—the “Cone Tone” by Hirschman Mutes.

Clarinetist-saxophonist Anat Cohen has won hearts and minds around the globe with her expressive virtuosity and magnetic stage presence, earning esteem both as a musician’s musician and as a performer who charms new recruits to the jazz art like few others. With her acclaimed albums, sold-out world tours and Grammy Award nominations adding up over the past two and a half decades — not to mention the glowing profiles by such totemic outlets as NPR’s Fresh Air and The New York Times — it has become apparent that the Brooklyn-based Anat has evolved into one of the music’s great border-bounding leaders, as not only an artist but as an educator, an ambassador. At the core of this, there is always her jubilant, ever-exploratory music-making, as a soloist, bandleader, collaborator and composer. Revered journalist and jazz sage Nat Hentoff encapsulated her artistry this way: “Anat does what all authentic musicians do: She tells stories from her own experiences that are so deeply felt that they are very likely to connect listeners to their own dreams, desires and longings.”

A born collaborator, Anat has worked with artists from Latin jazz star Paquito D’Rivera and breakout vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant to arthouse pianist Fred Hersch and the all-star, all-woman band Artemis, among others. With her brothers in The 3 Cohens, she has toured the world and recorded five albums. DownBeat put the group on its cover, and All About Jazz asserted: “To the ranks of the Heaths of Philadelphia, the Joneses of Detroit and the Marsalises of New Orleans, fans can now add the 3 Cohens of Tel Aviv.” Also a natural educator, Anat teaches at the Stanford University Jazz Workshop in California and The New School in Manhattan, among other institutions, and she has been Jazz Artist-in-Residence at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute.

Coinciding with her solo appearance on the cover of DownBeat for the magazine’s March 2025 issue, Anat played four milestone concerts in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Appel Room, overlooking the Manhattan skyline. “Anat Cohen: Journeys — A 50th Birthday Celebration” presented her with Quartetinho and the Tentet, in Duo and a in a sextet. Capturing her broad, galvanizing appeal, the Chicago Tribune has said out about Anat: “The lyric beauty of her tone, easy fluidity of her technique and extroverted manner of her delivery make this music accessible to all.”