Don Byron (clarinets, bass clarinet, tenor sax) has spent three decades refusing to let any single genre hold him — classical clarinet under Joe Allard, Third Stream study with George Russell at New England Conservatory, a 1990s Downtown emergence with Plays the Music of Mickey Katz and Bug Music, the Raymond Scott and John Kirby project — moving since through salsa, hip-hop, funk, klezmer, German lieder, hard rock, and swing-to-downtown jazz, a sound above genre by the long-standing tag, each idiom reworked from inside its own craft. Grammy-nominated for the Ivey-Divey bass clarinet solo on I Want to Be Happy, Pulitzer finalist in 2009 for Seven Etudes for solo piano, Rome Prize Fellow the same year, MIT MLK Visiting Professor 2007–08, Black Rock Coalition member, composer, arranger, social critic.