Don Byron has been consistently voted best clarinetist by critics and readers alike in leading international music journals since being named "Jazz Artist of the Year" by Down Beat in 1992. Continually striving for what he calls "a sound above genre", Byron has created a unique musical aesthetic in a wide range of contexts over the years.

Born and raised in the Bronx, Byron was exposed to a wide variety of music at home by his father, who played bass in calypso bands, and his mother, a pianist. His taste was further refined by trips to the symphony and ballet and by many hours spent listening to Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Machito recordings. Byron formalized his music education by studying classical clarinet with Joe Allard while playing and arranging salsa numbers for high school bands on the side. He later studied with George Russel in the Third Stream Department of the New England Conservatory of Music and, while in Boston, also performed with Latin and jazz ensembles.

His artistic collaborations include performances and recordings with Mario Bauza, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, John Hicks, Tom Cora, Bill Frisell, Vernon Reid, Marc Ribot, Cassandra Wilson, Hamiet Bluiett, Anthony Braxton, Geri Allen, Hal Willner, Marilyn Crispell, Reggie Workman, Craig Harris, Leroy Jenkins, Bobby Previte, Gerry Hemingway, DD Jackson, Douglas Ewart, Brandon Ross, Ed Neumeister, Tom Pierson, Steve Coleman, David Murray, Living Colour, Ralph Peterson, Uri Caine, Mandy Patinkin, Steve Lacy, the Kansas City Allstars, the Bang On A Can All-Stars, Angelique Kidjo, Carole King, Daniel Barenboim, Salif Keita, the Atlanta Symphony, Klangforum Wien, Joe Henry, and many others.

An integral member of New York’s cultural community for more than a decade, Byron has taken part in an extraordinarily wide range of projects. For four seasons, Byron served as artistic director for jazz at the Brooklyn Academy of Music where he curated concert series for the Next Wave Festival and premiered his children's show, Bug Music for Juniors (formerly Tunes and 'Toons). Other projects include his arrangements of Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musicals; There Goes the Neighborhood, a piece commissioned and performed by the Kronos Quartet; original scores for the silent film Scar of Shame and a 1961 comedic television episode by Ernie Kovacs. He wrote and performed music for the Bebe Miller Dance Company and was featured in Robert Altman's movie Kansas City and the Paul Auster film Lulu on the Bridge. A recent residency at the Library of Congress featured his Fine Line band, the premiere of Slip, his composition for violin and piano commissioned by the McKim Foundation, and a lecture about music films.

Byron is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Symphony Space in New York City, where he created Contrasting Brilliance: The Music of Henry Mancini and Sly Stone during a creative residency in 2000. There he also collaborated with choreographer Mark Dendy on Face the Music and Dance, worked with young people through the Curriculum Arts Program, participated as a featured performer in Wall to Wall Miles Davis last spring, and develops new programs for future seasons. Scheduled for April 2002 is Sugar Hill Revisited, a tribute to the pioneering rap label and its stars. It will feature Don Byron leading the Symphony Space Adventurers Orchestra plus special guests.

Byron's current ensembles include Music for Six Musicians, a new quintet with drummer Ralph Peterson, a sextet dedicated to early Ellington that he calls "Jungle Music for Post-Moderns", and Bug Music/Bug Music for Juniors. During Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2001 festivities, he performed as a featured soloist with the Atlanta Symphony for NPR's Performance Today. In May 2001, he was given his own festival at the Konzerthaus in Vienna, where he performed three concerts, one of them dedicated to rare chamber works by his musical hero, Igor Stravinsky. He is currently working on soundtracks for two documentary films for PBS and producing an album of his "Six Musicians" pianist Edsel Gomez.

Don Byron has released a diverse array of recordings  during the 1990s. Following his groundbreading recording debut, Tuskegee Experiments (Nonesuch, 1992), Byron’s other projects include: Don Byron plays the Music of Mickey Katz (Nonesuch, 1993), a tribute to the musically challenging and bitingly humorous works of the neglected 1950‘s klezmer band leader; Music for six musicians  (Nonesuch, 1995) which explores a significant side of his musical identity, the Afro-Caribbean heritage of his family and the neighborhood where he grew up; No-Vibe Zone (Knitting Factory Works, 1996), a vibrant live recording featuring his jazz quintet; and Bug Music (Nonesuch, 1996), his spirited showcase of the nascent Swing Ear music of Raymond Scott, John Kirby and the young Duke Ellington based on meticulous and faithful transcriptions of their recordings. 

His 1998 Blue Note debut Nu Blaxploitation is a wide-ranging musical meditation with his band Existential Dred that fulfilled its promise to be a “genre bending experience” by featuring poet Sadiq Bey and rap icon Biz Markie in performances reminiscent of the spoken word pieces of Gil Scott-Heron, Amiri Baraka and Henry Rollins. Romance with the Unseen, followed in 1999 and featured the clarinetist leading a quartet consisting of guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Drew Gress and drummer Jack DeJohnette through a wide variety of repertory, from obscure Ellington ("A Mural from Two Perspectives") to popular Beatles ("I'll Follow the Sun") to Byron originals loaded with socio-political commentary ("Bernhard Goetz, James Ramseur and Me", a reference to the notorious 1984 New York City subway shooting). With 2000's A Fine Line: Arias & Lieder Byron continued to blur stylistic borders by exploring and expanding the definition of the modern art song from Robert Schumann and Giacomo Puccini to Roy Orbison and Stevie Wonder. His newest recording, You are #6: More Music for Six Musicians, once again finds Byron in the company of his longest-standing unit, Music for Six Musicians, paying tribute to the Latin and Afro-Caribbean rhythms at his musical roots.

December 2001

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“Mr Byron has not only almost single-handedly revived an instrument that was pronounced moribund with the end of the swing era – since Benny Goodman, how many other major clarinettists weren’t merely moonlighting sax players? – he has also taken a scholarly approach to jazz without a hint of academic stuffiness ...   Every time Mr. Byron revisits the music of the neglected jazz figure of mixes hip-hop with jazz in a  way that eluded the acid jazzers, he’s not only charting new musical territory but he’s actually an undercover critic trying to re-write the music’s history.” 
The New York Times March 2000

Biography by Hans Wendl Productions
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