Composer and clarinetist Jonathan Russell is active in a wide variety of music, from classical to experimental to klezmer to church music. His work stretches the boundaries of contemporary classical music, opening it up to the sounds and attitudes of the other musical traditions surrounding it. He has received commissions from ensembles such as the San Francisco Symphony, Empyrean Ensemble, ADORNO Ensemble, Classical Revolution, Woodstock Chamber Orchestra, and Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, and performances from numerous other ensembles and performers, including the Berkeley Symphony, San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, the BluePrint Project, the Great Noise Ensemble, the new music bands FIREWORKS, Capital M, and Oogog, and pianists Sarah Cahill, Lisa Moore, Lara Downes, and Matthew McCright.
           
In the spring of 2009, Jonathan served as music director, composer, and arranger for The Illuminated Book of Invisible Stories, a new dance production by acclaimed choreographers Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton. After a highly successful run of sold-out shows at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, it is slated to return for a longer run in January 2010. In the 2007 New Ariel Competition, Jonathan’s piano piece Metamorphosis #1 was chosen to be professionally recorded for release on the Capstone record label by pianist Jeffrey Jacob. His orchestral composition Essay was the winner of the 2002 Lee Highsmith Orchestral Composition Competition, and received Honorable Mention in the 2003 Minnesota Orchestra Reading Competition. Upcoming projects include commissions from the Paul Dresher Ensemble, pianist Matthew McCright, and saxophonist Lois Hicks-Wozniak.
           
An avid performer on clarinet and bass clarinet, Jonathan is a member of the heavy metal-inspired Edmund Welles bass clarinet quartet and the Balkan/klezmer/experimental band Zoyres. He also plays in, composes for, and is a founding member of the Sqwonk bass clarinet duo, which has commissioned new works from twelve composers in the past three years. He is co-director of the Switchboard Music Festival, an annual eight-hour marathon concert that brings together the San Francisco Bay Area’s most creative and innovative composers and performers, who are stretching the boundaries and definitions of contemporary music.
           
Jonathan has served on the Music Theory Faculty at San Francisco Conservatory and on the Composition Faculty at the Conservatory’s Adult Extension Division. He has also served as Music Director at First Congregational Church, San Francisco, and written for the online San Francisco Classical Voice. He has a B.A. in Music from Harvard University and an M.M. in Music Composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His composition teachers have included Dan Becker, Elinor Armer, Eric Sawyer, John Stewart, and Eric Ewazen.