a nonprofit presenter of jazz artistic and education programs

Paul Contos has been profoundly involved in jazz performance and jazz education in the Bay Area and internationally since the 1970s. His mentoring and teaching in jazz education has touched hundreds of lives and the roster of students Contos has tutored include brilliant talent such as: Donny McCaslin, Hafez Modirzadeh, Remy and Pascal LeBoeuf, David Valdez, Kyle Athayde, Chase Baird, Milton Fletcher, Tanya Darby, Eric Crystal, Pat Carroll, Alex Han, and a host of others. His work for the Monterey Jazz Festival’s Education Program since the 1980s as Saxophone Clinician and Director of both The Next Generation Jazz Orchestra and Monterey County All-Stars is distinguished and thoroughly comprehensive.

Contos is faculty member at UC Santa Cruz and Cal State Monterey Bay, has taught at Monterey Peninsula College, and conducts, performs, and adjudicates at college and high school jazz festivals as well as serving as Artist in Residence for school jazz programs. In the University environment, Contos singularly developed the curriculum and pedagogy for the Music Recording/Technology Concentration at CA State Univ. Monterey Bay. Contos has received three performer grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as serving as Artist In Residence for the California Arts Council and being on their touring roster. In Feb. 2009 Contos was featured as saxophone soloist at Carnegie Hall as part of New York City’s Distinguished Concerts International, performing a jazz concerto by composer Jeff Beal.

Mr. Contos was active in the formation of the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz, and has played and recorded with many of the Bay Area’s finest jazz artists such as Ray Drummond, Eddie Marshall, Kenneth Nash, Vince Lateano, Madeline Eastman, Mark Levine, Rebeca Mauleón, Bruce Forman, Tee Carson, Dave Eshelman, Ray Brown. He has also shared the stage such luminaries as Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, the Heath Brothers, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Christian McBride, Kurt Elling, Regina Carter, Gary Burton, Wayne Shorter, Terence Blanchard, John Faddis, David “Fathead” Newman, and many others.