American conductor Gregory Robbins enjoys a diverse career as a performer, educator, bassist, and arts advocate.

He has held positions as Associate Conductor of the Greater Bridgeport Symphony, Music Director of the Delphi Chamber Orchestra, and Director of Orchestral Programs at Idyllwild Arts Academy & Summer Program. In 2022 he was appointed to the faculty of Ball State University, directing the orchestral programs and the graduate orchestral conducting program. As a guest conductor, he has made recent appearances with the Redlands Symphony, Norwalk Youth Symphony, Yonkers Philharmonic, Pazardjik Symphony (Bulgaria) and Symphony by the Sea.

A strong advocate for music education, Robbins has extensive experience working with a variety of Youth, Secondary, and Collegiate ensembles. He has guest conducted at Yale School of Music, NYU, and lectured at Mannes College: The New School for Music. During the summer of 2015 he began an appointment to the conducting staff of the New York State Summer School for the Arts, in a program presented in conjunction with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He was formerly the education director for the Geneva Music Festival.

Robbins is active in the worlds of Jazz and Popular Music, and recently received a 2022 GRAMMY nomination in the category of Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album, conducting the sophomore album of the NYC based big-band Assembly of Shadows. In 2018, he led a performance at Brooklyn Academy of Music featuring John Cale (formerly of Velvet Underground) and the Wordless Music Orchestra which gained wide acclaim from The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker. In the world of film and tv, he was the “conducting coach” for Gael Garcia Bernal, star of Amazon’s hit Mozart in the Jungle series.

As a chamber musician, Robbins has performed with such luminaries as David Frankl, Clive Greensmith, and Ani Kavafian, among others. He has also collaborated with members of the Tokyo, Linden, and Attacca string quartets for concerts at Carnegie Hall and the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival.

He received his formal training at Yale School of Music and Manhattan School of Music, and currently resides in Muncie, Indiana.

By the time she began classes at her hometown Seattle’s nationally renowned Roosevelt High School, Sara Gazarek was no stranger to the vocal arts: singing in public had come easily to her as a child. But the untutored young singer found a new outlet for her talent in the school’s award-winning jazz program. (“I didn’t know what middle C was,” she recounts, “but I could swing, and I had a really strong ear for improvisation.”) When the school’s jazz orchestra entered the Essentially Ellington competition in New York, Gazarek emerged with the “Best Vocal Soloist” award. She also had discovered her true calling, realizing that jazz allowed her to reveal “the human behind the music, instead of just some character in an onstage musical.”

Gazarek attended the University of Southern California, where she studied with bassist-arranger John Clayton and vocalist Tierney Sutton, and won a Downbeat student music award in 2003. Just a few years later, at all of 23 years old, she recorded her debut album, Yours, followed by a two-month nationwide tour. Gazarek’s subsequent studio albums – Return to You (2007), Blossom & Bee (2012), and Dream in the Blue (2016) – continued to earn critical raves and cement her reputation as an important young jazz voice.In 2016, after departing from her 11-year musical alliance with pianist Josh Nelson, she began working with other collaborators (Billy Childs, Kurt Elling, Fred Hersch, Geoffrey Keezer, Alan Ferber, Helen Sung, among others), and expanding her range of inspirations, a process that led to the breakthrough album Thirsty Ghost (2019). “Before that, my records were beauty-focused instead of expression-focused,” she says, pinpointing the creative “aha” moment that led her to delve deep into her own experiences, the darkness as well as the light. Thirsty Ghost subsequently received two GRAMMY® nominations and established her as a vital and intrepid vocal artist.

On her latest release, the EP Vanity, Gazarek continues to concentrate on singing truth instead of mimicking beauty, stretching her musicianship and vocal toolbox. The four-song collection also includes the first composition from Gazarek, who had already proven herself a skilled lyricist on previous recordings.

Now based in Los Angeles, Gazarek often tours internationally as a soloist/band leader, and as a co-founder of the vocal collective, säje, whose debut album earned a GRAMMY Award® for Best Arrangement Instruments and Vocals. Sara is a 2023 Chamber Music of America New Jazz Works grant recipient, serves on the LA Chapter Board of Governors for the Recording Academy, and works as an Associate Professor of Jazz Voice at the Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester) where she is currently designing and leading their new jazz voice program. Sara’s full length nonet project, an expansion of her critically celebrated EP Vanity, is set to release in Fall of 2024.