E P K
The official electronic press kit for Logan Richardson — artist, composer, saxophonist and creative director.
This page is continuously updated with current biography, press photography, music, video, touring information and production materials.
BOLD MOVES IN CURRENT PROJECTS
A LIVING SCORE
Interdisciplinary · Electronic · Acoustic · Site-Responsive
A Living Score is Logan Richardson’s evolving interdisciplinary performance ecosystem, bringing together composition, improvisation, acoustic instruments, electronics, environmental sound and real-time experimentation.
Rather than presenting a fixed repertoire, the project treats each performance as an active composition. Saxophone, piano, synthesis, sampling, electronics and environmental interfaces create an open architecture that can expand from intimate solo performance to ensemble work and installation.
At its center is an ongoing investigation of resonance—between acoustic and electronic sound, human gesture and technology, improvisation and structure, artist and environment.
The score is not simply performed. It is continuously becoming.
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blues PEOPLE
Contemporary Blues · Black American Music · Composition · Improvisation
blues PEOPLE is Logan Richardson’s working ensemble exploring the blues as a living, contemporary language.
Rather than treating blues as a fixed historical form, the project draws from its deeper continuum—rhythm, improvisation, storytelling, groove and collective expression—while placing those elements inside Richardson’s contemporary compositional language.
The result is music that acknowledges lineage without becoming bound by it: an evolving investigation of what the blues means, sounds like and can become in the present.
The blues not as artifact, but as living language.
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LO HA WATTS
Acoustic · Modern · Improvised
Logan Richardson · Harish Raghavan · Jeff “Tain” Watts
LO HA WATTS is an acoustic modern improvised trio bringing together Logan Richardson on saxophone, Harish Raghavan on bass and Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums.
Built around the elemental saxophone–bass–drums configuration, the trio functions as a highly responsive improvisational unit. Composition provides architecture while rhythm, melody, space and collective interaction continually reshape the music in real time.
Richardson, Raghavan and Watts bring three distinct musical languages into a deliberately exposed acoustic environment—moving freely between abstraction, groove, stillness and intensity.
A continuing research into what the acoustic trio can become now.
BIO
LOGAN RICHARDSON
Artist · Composer · Saxophonist · Producer · Creative Director
Logan Richardson is an American artist, composer, saxophonist and producer whose career has developed across contemporary music, Black American Music, improvisation, recording, film and multidisciplinary performance. Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Richardson has built an international body of work distinguished by an immediately identifiable instrumental voice and an approach to composition that moves freely between acoustic music, electric ensembles, production, electronics and experimental forms.
Described by DownBeat as “one of the most gifted and transformative alto saxophonists of his generation,”Richardson belongs to the continuing lineage of musical innovators to emerge from Kansas City while maintaining a practice that consistently pushes beyond conventional definitions of jazz.
Richardson began working professionally at sixteen. His formative Kansas City years placed him in direct contact with the city’s musical lineage, including early professional experience with legendary pianist and bandleader Jay McShannand a performance with the Kansas City Symphony while still a teenager. His development was further shaped through encounters with major figures including Max Roach and a generation of master musicians who passed through Kansas City’s musical institutions.
After leaving Kansas City, Richardson studied at Berklee College of Music before relocating to New York and continuing his studies at The New School. New York became an important period of artistic expansion. Richardson entered an international community of improvisers and composers and began performing, recording and touring with artists including Joe Chambers, Billy Hart, Butch Morris, Jason Moran, Stefon Harris, Nasheet Waits, Ambrose Akinmusire, Gerald Clayton and others.
That work developed alongside Richardson’s career as a bandleader.
His debut recording, Cerebral Flow, was followed by Ethos, establishing a compositional and improvisational language that would continue to expand across subsequent recordings. Richardson later became a member, arranger and co-producer of NEXT Collective, whose Cover Art was released by Concord Records.
A major turning point came with SHIFT, Richardson’s Blue Note Records leader debut. The project assembled an exceptional group featuring Pat Metheny, Jason Moran, Harish Raghavan and Nasheet Waits, placing Richardson’s compositions inside a highly individual meeting of generations and musical languages. The recording further established Richardson internationally as an artist capable of connecting the historical depth of improvised music with rock, electronic sound, contemporary production and his own increasingly cinematic compositional vocabulary.
His subsequent work has continued that expansion through recordings including blues PEOPLE, Afrofuturism, Holy Water and Sacred Garden, alongside appearances on recordings and projects by artists including Gerald Clayton, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Nduduzo Makhathini and others. Across his career, Richardson has contributed to projects involving internationally recognized and Grammy-winning and Grammy-nominated artists and collaborators.
Richardson’s creative practice also extends beyond the traditional recording and concert environment.
His work encompasses composition, production, sound design, multidisciplinary performance and screen-related projects, including creative work in proximity to film, actors, directors and other disciplines. This increasingly cinematic dimension of his practice reflects a larger interest in narrative, character, environment and the relationship between sound and image.
Rather than separating these activities, Richardson approaches them as components of a single evolving artistic language.
Today that language can be seen particularly clearly through three ongoing projects.
A Living Score is Richardson’s interdisciplinary performance ecosystem—a continuously evolving meeting of acoustic instruments, electronics, environmental sound, technology, improvisation and real-time composition. The work can move between solo performance, ensemble, installation and site-responsive collaboration, allowing architecture, geography, performers and environment to become part of the composition itself.
blues PEOPLE, founded in 2018 and conceptually connected to Amiri Baraka’s Blues People, investigates the lineage, condition and future possibilities of Black American Music. Featured on NPR’s Tiny Desk series, Kansas City rock, blues and jazz coexist with electric guitars, rock, soul, electronics, production and speculative imagery. The project treats history not as a stylistic restriction but as living information from which new musical futures can be constructed. EPK MATERIALS HERE
LO HA WATTS, Richardson’s acoustic modern improvised trio with bassist Harish Raghavan and drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts, moves toward the opposite end of the spectrum. Saxophone, acoustic bass and drums become a deliberately exposed research environment for rhythm, composition, space and collective improvisation—asking what one of improvised music’s most elemental configurations can become in the present.
These projects represent different manifestations of the same larger practice: environment, lineage and interaction; electronic, electric and acoustic; composition, transformation and improvisation.
Across nearly three decades of professional activity, Richardson has moved between Kansas City, New York, Europe and an international network of collaborators, stages and institutions. His work has appeared on major and independent labels, in internationally presented ensembles and alongside some of the most significant musicians of multiple generations.
Yet Richardson’s trajectory is defined less by a single genre or career category than by continual reconstruction.
For Richardson, the history of Black American Music is neither museum object nor endpoint. It is an active technology—a body of information capable of being studied, transformed and projected forward. Improvisation becomes research. Production becomes composition. Electronics and acoustic sound occupy the same continuum. Film, visual culture, architecture and environment become potential extensions of musical thinking.
Whether working with an acoustic trio, an electric ensemble, a recording studio, actors and filmmakers, or an interdisciplinary performance system, Richardson’s central concern remains consistent:
where sound comes from, what it carries, and what it can become next.
VIDEOS
“Logan is an example of someone who has a vision of sound and a strong conception, as well as just being a fantastic musician.”
— PAT METHENY · DOWNBEAT