Paul Contos has been involved in jazz performance and education for nearly fifty years. His contributions to the Monterey Jazz Festival’s Education Program as Saxophone Clinician and Director of both The Next Generation Jazz Orchestra and Monterey County All-Stars are distinguished and thoroughly comprehensive.

Contos is a faculty member at University of California, Santa Cruz and California State University, Monterey Bay, having singularly developed the curriculum for the Music Recording/Technology Concentration at CSUMB. He is also a founder of the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz.  Contos has received performer grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2017 received DownBeat Magazine’s Jazz Education Achievement Award. He also serves as Artist in Residence for the California Arts Council.

Contos has played and recorded with many of the Bay Area’s finest jazz artists, including Ray Drummond, Eddie Marshall, and Madeline Eastman, and has shared the stage with such luminaries as Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Christian McBride, Regina Carter, Wayne Shorter, and many others.