Jon Irabagon

About

Jon Irabagon won the 2008 Thelonious Monk Jazz Competition, with judges including Wayne Shorter and Jimmy Heath, and used part of the prize money to study with Roscoe Mitchell. That tells you something about his range right there. The Filipino American saxophonist moves freely across a huge stretch of musical territory, from post bop and free improvisation to metal tinged noise, and he has shared stages or sessions with everyone from Wynton Marsalis and Herbie Hancock to Lou Reed and Conor Oberst. He founded Irabbagast Records partly because he figured nobody else would put out his more extreme work, launching the label in 2012 with two very different releases at once. That dual release approach became something of a habit. He is a core member of the Mary Halvorson and Dave Douglas quintets, leads his own groups including a quartet with Luis Perdomo, Yasushi Nakamura, and Rudy Royston, and recorded eleven albums with the cult group Mostly Other People Do the Killing, including their notorious note for note recreation of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue.