Chord Melody

Bruce Acosta is an up and coming guitarist based in New York City. Born in Dubai, he grew up in Canada, Australia and Minnesota, picking up the guitar at age seven. As a high schooler, Acosta was selected for the Brubeck Summer Jazz Colony and the Minnesota All-State Jazz Band and recognized as a National YoungArts award winner.

Born Charles Jagelka, New Yorker Chuck Wayne was a jazz guitarist, composer and arranger noted for distinctive bebop style and legato technique. He became an expert in the banjo, mandolin and balalaika as a child, focusing on swing. He was heavily influenced by classical music in addition to jazz. He became prominent in the early 1940s on NYC's 52nd Street and in Greenwich Village where he made the transition to bebop. Influenced by Oscar Moore and Charlie Christian, and horn players of the day like Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker, Chuck made his way into Woody Herman's big band and later worked with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, spreading the bebop revolution with recordings like Groovin' High and Blue 'n' Boogie.

Belgian jazz guitarist Jeanfrançois Prins is a professional musician, arranger, producer, and educator. By the age of nineteen Prins was a band leader and was awarded the "Golden Sax" and First Prize for Instrumental Performance at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique de Bruxelles. He has released six CDs as a leader. His most recent, "El Gaucho," was recorded in NYC and released on Challenge Records in mid-2012. His interviews and performances have been featured on TV around the globe. In 1994 he was an actor/musician in the Oscar-nominated Belgian movie, "Just Friends."

Jimmy Raney was one of the most fluent and deft bebop players of all time, having assimilated the language of musicians such as Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie in such a thorough manner that pianist Barry Harris, one of the world’s foremost bebop masters, once remarked that “Man this cat (Jimmy Raney) plays like Yard (Charlie Parker)!”’