Nathan Nakadegawa-Lee & Kaz George Group

An evening of original and arranged compositions with stylistic influences from jazz, blues, and free improvisation.

Nathan Nakadegawa-Lee - saxophone

Kaz George

Isaac Coyle - bass

Miles Turk - drums

Born and raised in Oakland, California, saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer Nathan Nakadegawa-Lee embodies a striking mix of sounds deriving from improvised, vocal, blues, and jazz traditions. He is a graduate of The New School’s Jazz and Contemporary Music program, where he studied with luminaries such as Melissa Aldana, Darius Jones, Tivon Pennicott, David Glasser, Or Bareket, Jon Irabagon, Anat Cohen, Joshua Rubin, and Ismail Lumaneovsky. In Oakland, Nathan has taught at Oakland Summer Music, Oakland Public Conservatory, and his alma mater Claremont Middle School, providing music education at no cost to middle schoolers.

As a performer, Nathan has appeared alongside generational artists such as Billy Martin, Faye Carol, Azure McCall, Selendis Sebastian Alexander Johnson, and Lesley Mok. He has performed internationally in Tokyo, and the Bern Jazz Festival in Switzerland, in the Bay Area at Yoshi’s Oakland, and The Sound Room, and NYC at Dizzy’s Jazz Club, The Stone, and Le Poisson Rouge. A big supporter of community organizing, Nathan hosts eclectic house shows and Improv Nights, and continues to compose, improvise, and perform in New York City and the Bay Area.

Kazemde George is an African American Jazz saxophonist, composer, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Raised by Caribbean parents in Berkeley, California, Kaz has been playing Saxophone, Piano and Percussion in a wide range of musical styles from an early age.

Kazemde attended college in Boston where he completed the Harvard/New England Conservatory (NEC) Joint program, receiving his Bachelors in Neurobiology (Harvard) and his Masters in Jazz Composition (NEC). At NEC, Kazemde studied with Miguel Zenón, Jerry Bergonzi, Jason Moran, Cecil McBee, Donny McCaslin, Danilo Pérez, and John McNeil. In 2012, he received Harvard’s George Peabody Gardener Fellowship to study traditional music in La Habana, Cuba for ten months. Through his travels, Kaz has expanded his focus from Hip-Hop and Jazz to include the full spectrum of musical styles which blossomed from the African Diaspora, including Afro-Cuban, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Brazilian, and African-American traditions. As he sees it, the study of these musical styles serves as a way to regain cultural histories that were lost through the processes of African-American Slavery.

Today, his focus is aligned towards music, but Kazemde is also a biologist at heart, and his quest to understand this wide breadth of styles is driven by an analytical mind with a scientific approach.

Isaac Coyle is a bassist, composer, and educator residing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since graduating from the Berklee College of music in 2023, Isaac has become one of the top call bassists in the Bay Area jazz scene. In addition he is also a frequent collaborator in Terri Lyne Carrington’s New Standards band, performing throughout the country.

Raised in Oakland and immersed in the Bay Area’s vibrant music community, drummer Miles Turk seeks to follow the tradition in appreciating the cultural importance of blues, bebop, jazz, etc. along with shining a light on his own musical influences coming from R&B, Hip-Hop, Funk, & many more.

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