Brooklyn Composer Jessica Jones is originally from Berkeley, California, and began her professional life in jazz, improvised music, and Caribbean bands. As a teenager, she received the ‘Excellence in Youth’ award from City of Berkeley for music composition. The primary outlet for her compositions for the past 20 years has been the Jessica Jones Quartet, a pianoless quartet, garnering praise such as this statement from Jazz Now magazine: “It’s the writing for horns that carries the CD onto a very rarefied level. Elastic, whirring, and yet with a classical sense of construction” Jones also arranged for Haitian and Trinidadian bands, and has written a body of work for children’s jazz bands which she uses in her teaching practice.

Jones composed an all-women opera, ‘Post Pardon’, which premiered as a work in progress in 2014 with a grant from the City of Oakland, a performance praised as “ beautiful, haunting and unexpected” by the Daily Californian, which went on to say that the “skilled portrayal of such emotional gravitas crushed and overwhelmed the packed house.’

As a jazz composer, she has written music to collaborate with poets & vocalists as well as prominent jazz artists including trumpeter Don Cherry, saxist Joseph Jarman, pianist Connie Crothers and French hornist Mark Taylor. In addition, she has composed for small chamber groups, and had a solo piano piece debuted by Sarah Cahill, an eminent pianist specializing in new American music and works from the American experimental tradition.