Chris Jonas is a Santa Fe-based composer, saxophone player, and video artist. As an instrumentalist and composer/conductor, he has performed, recorded, and toured internationally with many of today’s most adventurous artists, working extensively with Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, William Parker, Del Sol String Quartet, TILT Brass, the Crossing Choir, and others. Jonas is a United States Artists Fellow and a winner of the 2012 Meet the Composer/Commissioning USA Award for GARDEN, his ongoing series of live music and transmedia works. He is Executive Director of Littleglobe, the New Mexico arts and social justice non-profit, and is Vice President of the Tri-Centric Foundation, an organization committed to the work and legacy of Anthony Braxton. In 2019, Jonas was conductor for Braxton’s 6-hour, 63-person orchestra project, Sonic Genome, at the Berlin Jazz Festival.
Jonas has received commissions for large-scale music and video performance projects with many international artists, including the Del Sol String Quartet, Duo B Experimental Band, the Crossing Choir, with ensembles and musicians in Berlin, Portugal and Ireland, the Chicago Improvisors Group, and with numerous international venues, including SITE Santa Fe, the Lensic, the Santa Fe Opera, Center for New Music, Roulette, Lincoln Center, Knitting Factory, Z-Space in San Francisco, Triskel Arts Center in Cork, Ireland, Gropius Bau in Berlin, Germany, and the National Theater and Concert Hall in Taipei, Taiwan.
You can read his full bio here.
"Chris Jonas’ remarkable composed suites [are] subtle breakthroughs and fantastic journeys."
- Ann Powers, June 6, 2001, New York Times
"Chis Jonas [is a] a gifted and original avant-garde soprano saxophonist and composer."
- Harvey Pekar, Nov 16, 2000, Cleveland Scene
"Jonas’ imaginative, provocative compositions and arrangements that really stick out and make him one to watch."
- Peter Margasak, April 25, 2019, JazzTimes
"Jonas cultivates a fluid relationship in his music between spontaneous gestures and planned ones; elaborately scored structures and dense improvisations can coexist within an album-length composition, sometimes as contrasting elements and sometimes as simultaneous events."
- Bill Meyer, March 29, 2001, Chicago Reader