Over a career spanning more than forty years, the composer and pianist Muhal Richard Abrams is widely recognized as one of the most influential artists in the area of contemporary improvised music. As a founding member and guiding force of the Chicago-based creative cauldron, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the highly influential, community-based musicians' collective that has been active since 1965, Mr. Abrams has been a central figure in the shaping and definition of a large variety of innovative approaches to the integration of composition, improvisation and performance. Mr. Abrams has produced a large body of recorded work, including at least twenty-five record albums of his work alone, by companies in the United States, Europe, and Japan. His music has been performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Kronos Quartet, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, and the distinguished duo piano team of Ursula Oppens and Frederic Rzewski. He has received commissions from the McKim Fund of the Library of Congress, the Kitchen Center (New York), the New Music America Festival, and the Bang on a Can Festival (New York). In 1990, Mr. Abrams was the first recipient of the prestigious international jazz award, the JazzPar Prize, presented by the Danish Jazz Center in Copenhagen. Mr. Abrams's trenchant, hybrid approach to structure in improvised music often incorporates a notion of intertextuality, juxtaposing and recontextualizing material from many different sources. His notated compositions for non-improvisors frequently include a strongly articulated mobility of form, combining precomposed and notated elements with indeterminacy, improvisation, microtonality and electronics. Muhal Richard Abrams