If you're into music, you've probably encountered Jed Distler. He's all around you. You may remember Jed's scores to such airline boarding videos as Spring Flowers in Appalachia, holiday bargain CDs like Baby's First Christmas, or mini-operas like The Three Minute Saga of Rudolfo premiered at Lincoln Center. Some of you have played his published Bill Evans and Art Tatum transcriptions (also recorded by Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Steven Mayer). Or perhaps you've purchased a CD or two upon Jed's recommendation via regular reviews in Gramophone and Classicstoday.com. Did you here him play Beethoven with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at BAM, or two pianos with fellow Yamaha artists Kathleen Supové and Dick Hyman? Did you know about his triumphant 2006 recital festival tour of Italy? Every now and then you'll find Jed serving up keyboard banter for Mark Kostabi's cult TV show Title This. If nothing else, you saw Jed's name all over the newspapers in February 2007 when he helped uncover one of the great scandals of classical recording history.

Or else you've heard such compositions as Three Landscapes for Peter Wyer (for toy piano, recorded by Margaret Leng Tan on Point Records, and featured in no less than three movies!), Loose Changes for Two Pianos (recorded for Bridge Records by Quattro Mani), the String Quartet No. 1 (Mister Softee Variations), premiered in 1999 by the Flux Quartet and broadcast every summer on John Schaefer's New Sounds, or Jed's tour-de-force piano theater extravaganza The Gold Standard a collaboration with playwright Ed Schmidt. Go back to 1987, when Jed's evening-length song cycle, The Death of Lottie Shapiro, for four sopranos and piano, was hailed as "a masterpiece, a song cycle without parallel in the serious music of contemporary America" (Newark Star Ledger). On recitals and on disc, Jed has premiered works by Frederic Rzewski, Lois V Vierk, Virko Baley, Wendy Mae Chambers, Andrew Thomas, Virgil Thomson, David Maslanka, Douglas Geers, William Schimmel, Kitty Brazelton, Alvin Curran, Eleanor Hovda, Bob Windbiel, and many others. As the "inventive artistic director" (Allan Kozzin, New York Times) of ComposersCollaborative, Inc., Jed has created and programmed such innovative festivals as Solo Flights, Non Sequitur, and, most recently, the new music variety show Serial Underground every second Monday of the month at New York's landmark Cornelia Street Café. He's received grants from ASCAP. Meet the Composer, American Composers Forum, and a coveted McDowell Colony residency in the fall of 2001. Jed taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College, and has participated in guest composer/teacher residencies across the United States. For the full scope of Jed's musical life, visit www.composerscollab.org.