Terri Lyne Carrington is a NEA Jazz Master, Doris Duke Artist, and four-time Grammy award-winning drummer, composer, producer, and educator. She serves as founder and artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. She has performed on more than 100 recordings and toured with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Stan Getz, Esperanza Spalding, and many others. Carrington holds honorary doctorates from York University, Manhattan School of Music, and Berklee College of Music. She has authored two books: Three of a Kind (about the Allen Carrington Spalding trio) and New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers. The latter was accompanied by the Grammy-winning album New Standards Vol.1 and a New Standards art installation presented at venues in Detroit, Boston, and Washington D.C. as part of the Jazz Without Patriarchy project. This year she released the critically acclaimed album We Insist 2025!, a poignant re-imagining of Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite. The album reflects upon the past while challenging the present, honoring Roach's original masterpiece and furthering Carrington's passion for using jazz as a tool for social activism.

Meg Okura is a Grammy-nominated violinist and award-winning composer whose work bridges classical, jazz, and global traditions. A Tokyo native now based in New York City, she is known for her deeply expressive style and genre-defying vision. She founded and leads the Pan Asian Chamber Jazz Ensemble (PACJE), which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2025–2026 with its fifth album, Isaiah, featuring trumpeter Randy Brecker. A Juilliard-trained violinist, Okura has performed worldwide at Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Blue Note Tokyo, Birdland, and the Hollywood Bowl. Shaon Overture is a reckoning with time, memory, and inevitability. Its mood is shaped by ritual: the solemn chants of Japanese funerals, and the recurring season of the Jewish High Holy Days — both reminders of what may be lost. The opening scene recalls a fleeting cultural memory of Japan. This image is immediately interrupted by the relentless pulse of the wood block, the wooden fish drum that accompanies Buddhist monks as they chant scriptures in a steady rhythm. The title, Shaon means “clock” in Hebrew. The principal theme is formed from two cultural fragments: the first from the Freygish/Phrygian mode, the second from the Japanese Miyakobushi pentatonic scale. Together these motives create a sound world at once nostalgic and foreboding, where tenderness of memory is overshadowed by the fear of loss.