Kalia Vandever is a Grammy Award-winning trombonist and composer living in Brooklyn, NY. Their approach to the trombone is distinctive and defined by their sonorous tone and lyrical improvisational voice. They lean into the challenges of the instrument and allow patience and melody guide their process.

In their compositional practice, Kalia draws from their love of songs and improvisation, creating a landscape of sounds that resonate in the body and hold the listener. They released their debut ensemble album In Bloom in 2019, described as “the rise of an exciting voice for the music” (Seton Hawkins, Hot House Jazz Magazine). Their sophomore album Regrowth released in May 2022 on New Amsterdam Records and “confirms [their] strengths as a composer and bandleader with a distinctly contemporary point of view” (Nate Chinen, WBGO Jazz). Their debut solo album We Fell In Turn, featuring their works for trombone, voice and electronics, released on AKP Records in March 2023. Their newest album, Another View, features Mary Halvorson, Kanoa Mendenhall, and Kayvon Gordon, released in November 2025 and was praised by Downbeat for “its entrancing, cyclical rhythms and longing melodicism.”

Kalia received their Bachelor of Music degree in Jazz Studies at the Juilliard School in 2017. They have toured and performed internationally with their quartet, performing at festivals such as the Winter Jazz Festival and BRIC Jazz Festival. They are also known for their work as a side-person, performing with jazz artists including Joel Ross, Immanuel Wilkins, Fay Victor, to name a few. Kalia has also performed with popular artists including Harry Styles, Lizzo, Japanese Breakfast, Moses Sumney, Jennifer Hudson, and Demi Lovato. They have appeared on Saturday Night Live twice, as well as Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal.

Kalia is an awardee of the 2022 Next Jazz Legacy, a program founded by New Music USA and the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. Kalia was also selected to curate the 2022 Music Series for The Arts Center at Duck Creek in East Hampton. Along with their performance work, Kalia has been commissioned to write works for groups and individuals including Tesla Quartet, The Westerlies, Katherine Kyu Hyeon Lim, and Hats & Heels Duo.

Kalia is also experienced as an educator and is currently on faculty at the New England Conservatory. In addition, they have led masterclasses at universities including California Institute of the Arts, University of Chicago Illinois, Cal State Northridge, Saddleback College, University of Maine Farmington, and University of Missouri.

Kalia is also a founding member of tilt, a Brooklyn-based collective bringing together the voices of Isabel Crespo Pardo, Carmen Quill, and Kalia. The intimacy found in the ensemble is apparent through their evolving chemistry on stage and their symbiotic improvisational approach. They released their debut record something we once knew in 2024 on Dear Life Records.

Kalia endorses Conn Selmer and Bach instruments as well as Denis Wick London.

isabel crespo pardo is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist working across sound, performance, text, and visual art. Captivated by the realms of memory, spirit and ephemerality, they create rituals of transformation that center improvisation as a bridge to the subconscious. Drawing from latin american histories, black american art, and queer and trans thought, crespo treats performance as a site where vulnerability, interconnection, and form are negotiated in real time.

Their work often materializes as expanded scores and collaborative constellations. Projects include the poemsong trio sinonó, whose shifting sonic topographies fuse composition and improvisation; embroidered and screen-printed graphic scores that operate simultaneously as textile object and performative instruction; and Mighty Angel…come down clothed in rainbow-head, a performance work co-created with Anna Abondolo that stages monologue as invocation. Under the moniker iiisa, they are developing a solo body of work interlacing melody with archival recordings of their family in Costa Rica, constructing immersive sonic environments that function as “memory portals,” where solace is offered through the admission of non-linear becoming.

crespo has presented work at Pioneer Works, Bang on a Can’s LOUD WEEKEND, MATA Festival, and Big Ears Festival. Their artistic development has been supported by the Loghaven Artist Residency, Roulette Intermedium Residency, and the Van Lier Fellowship. They have collaborated with and performed works by Matthew Barney, Sandra Mujinga, and Raven Chacon.

Eden Girma is a multi-instrumental musician, vocalist, producer, and composer hailing from Madison, WI.  Having grown up at the nexus of widely varying and vibrant musical traditions, Eden creates through a variety of audio-visual-technological media — bridging realms such as popular music, improvisatory collaboration, expressionism, and experimental electronics. Through a genre-bending compositional ear and a poetic lyricism, they aspire to create art that not only resonates with individual hearts, but brings people closer together in a spirit of intimacy and empathy.

As a student in the Boston area, Eden has worked with and studied under Vijay Iyer, Yosvany Terry, Hans Tutschku, Dominique Eade, Frank Carlberg, and Ran Blake.   Eden graduated from Harvard College in 2018 with a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics and math, and in 2019 completed a Masters in Music in Creative Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Currently, Eden is a Ph.D candidate in Princeton University’s Astrophysics department. If you are interested in learning more about Eden’s scientific work, click here.

Yuka Honda (eucademix) is a composer, producer, and sonic innovator whose work defies genre and convention. Co-founder of the trailblazing duo Cibo Matto, she has since forged a solo path that blends electronic experimentation, improvisational depth, infectious rhythm, and abstract storytelling. She describes her music as quantum, continuum, and sensory—a fluid exploration of sound as both narrative and experience. Like a book or a film, her compositions invite the listener into a story: shifting through contrasting emotions, spaces, and textures to create an unfolding journey.

Honda began her musical path with classical piano lessons. Although she wasn’t drawn to much of the repertoire, she found lasting value in the ear training that remains one of her greatest assets today. After moving to New York City in the late 1980s, she was working as a food writer when she discovered the emerging world of digital instruments. Like many electronic musicians of her generation, she began composing in her bedroom, exploring not only chords and melodies but also the vast expressive possibilities of sonic manipulation. Her work was shaped by the sound of hip hop—where sampling, layering, and cross-genre collage redefined music—as well as by experimental production, microtonal detail, and the interplay between digital and live instrumentation.

In 1993 she met Miho Hatori, whose pop vocal sensibility fused with Honda’s experimental approach to form the groundbreaking duo Cibo Matto, releasing two acclaimed albums on Warner Brothers Records. Since then, Honda continued to expand her vision, and today performs her work as a solo artist under the name eucademix, bringing her singular sound world to stages worldwide.

Honda has collaborated with artists including Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, Nels Cline, Photay, Jason Lindner (Black Star), Dave Harrington (Darkside), L’Rain, and Martha Wainwright, and her recent projects span multimedia opera, museum performance, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Current highlights include Respira, a duo with Butoh dancer Azumi O E premiering at ISSUE Project Room, and her score for Karon Davis’s “Resurrection of Osiris” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Living in upstate New York, Honda draws inspiration from radical farming movements and her deep engagement with community, merging art, ecology, and philosophy into a singular sonic vision.

Deeply connected to the rhythms of the natural world, Honda is also a board member of the Catskills Agrarian Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to food sovereignty and regenerative agriculture. Her recent works, Farm Psychedelia I and Farm Psychedelia II honor the radical farmers of upstate New York who are innovating solutions to food insecurity, further bridging her artistic practice with her commitment to community and environmental stewardship.