Betti Xiang

Renowned erhu soloist Betti Xiang has performed in distinguished venues all over the United States, where she has lived since 1996.

Xiang was born in Shanghai, China, where her father, renowned erhu master Xiang Zuying, introduced her to the instrument. She debuted as an erhu soloist in 1981 with the Shanghai National Orchestra, with which she traveled worldwide and presented the premieres of numerous well-known Chinese composers. In 1986, she received the coveted Young Artists Award for outstanding solo artist in both Shanghai and Beijing. In 2005, Xiang was the guest artist at the inauguration of Chicago's Millennium Park, when she performed the erhu concerto, Crouching Tiger, by composer Tan Dun.She began performing with the Silk Road Ensemble in 2006.

During her career, Xiang's extraordinary performances have graced well-known venues worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Lincoln Center, and the Smithsonian Institute. Xiang's music has also been featured on National Public Radio and Chicago's WFMT. Among other honors, Xiang was invited to join the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as a special guest, when she performed the famous Chinese concerto, The Butterfly Lovers, with conductor David Alan Miller in 1996. As Illinois' World Ethnic Artist, Xiang has given erhu demonstrations at many local and regional universities.

Jimmy Burns

Jimmy Burns is an award winning American soul blues and electric blues slide guitarist, singer and songwriter.

Although he was born in the Mississippi Delta in 1943, Burns has spent nearly all his life in Chicago. Burns was raised on a cotton plantation in Mississippi where he learned to play the one-string and 12-string guitar. He was the youngest of eleven children. He sang in a church choir when he still lived in the Delta and he was influenced by the blues he heard on the streets. His favorite blues musician was Lightnin' Hopkins. Burns's father was a sharecropper who performed as a singer in medicine shows. At the age of 12, Jimmy Burns moved with his family to Chicago and four years later joined The Medallionaires who recorded a couple of doo-wop tracks.

Recording mostly solo in the 1960s, Burns issued singles for many labels. He toured the Midwest with his backing group, the Fantastic Epics, and with another outfit called Jimmy Burns and the Gas Company. Burns took a long break from the music industry after the early 1970s to raise his family and run a barbecue stand.

He performed infrequently until the early part of the 1990s, when he started a long residency at Chicago's Smokedaddy Club. It was there that Delmark Records boss Bob Koester first heard Burns perform, and agreed to record him after hearing only one set. His debut album for Delmark in 1996, Leaving Here Walking, was awarded the 'Best Blues Record of the Year' title by the National Association of Independent Record Distributors, and received two W.C. Handy Award nominations. Burns then began touring internationally, and has been performing and recording regularly since then. His most recent releases are Live at B.L.U.E.S and Stuck in the Middle.

Jim Stoynoff

Since 1962 Jim Stoynoff has specialized in the research, preservation and performance of Balkan folk music with a particular emphasis on the regional folk clarinet styles of early 20th Century Central Greece, Epiros, Macedonia and Turkey.

He has studied with several master clarinetists in each of these traditions. Jim has performed for hundreds of events within the Greek, Turkish, Epiroti and Macedonian communities throughout the US. He has collaborated with musicians from over 15 countries performing music from these various traditions. Of additional note are his performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Residency and the Chicago Immigrant Orchestra.

In addition to performing, Jim has also presented on Greek Music, designed exhibits, and curated content at a number of institutions and conferences including several universities, the International Clarinet Association, and the Hellenic National Museum in Chicago. His writings have been published in The Clarinet, Macedonian Tribune, Laografia Magazine, and Greek Circle Magazine.

Juan Rivera

Juan Rivera is a Chicago-based, two-time Grammy nominated musician who specializes in several styles of Mexican folk violin, including the ornate Huasteco style.

Juan Rivera was born in Aguililla, Michoacán. Both he and his brother developed an interest in music early on and went to Mexico City to pursue professional music studies at Casa de la Música Mexicana, where Juan later became an instructor. Rivera studied the Huasteco style of violin with Rolando “Quecho” Hernández and soon began recording with the group Son del Pueblo with whom he participated in two European tours accompanying the dance troupe Compañia Nacional de Danza Folclórica de México.

In 2001, Juan relocated to Chicago where he played with mariachi and other groups for several years. After a year of further musical study in California, Juan returned to Chicago in the spring of 2005 to join Sones de México Ensemble with whom he was twice nominated for a Grammy Award and has toured the U.S. coast-to-coast. Juan also formed his own trio Los Condenados Huastecos to focus exclusively on the huasteco style touring in Indiana, Illinois, and Texas. He has also continued to teach Mexican music at the Chicago Public Schools, and has been a member of the faculty at the annual Swannanoa Gathering Fiddle Week in North Carolina since 2013. He is proud to join the Old Town School of Folk Music’s “Iron Heart” program in 2015.

Liz Carroll

Liz Carroll was born in Chicago, the daughter of Irish immigrants from County Offaly and County Limerick. Her mother, Eileen, loved Irish music, and her father, Kevin, a button accordion player, began teaching Liz traditional tunes when she was five years old. Although she wanted piano lessons, the piano would not fit up the narrow staircase of the family’s two-flat, so Liz took up the violin. She began taking lessons when she was nine from Sister Francine, a nun at her parochial school. But informal Irish musical gatherings, called sessions, proved far more influential to her development. Liz honed her skills through years of playing at meetings of the Irish Musicians Association, and anywhere Irish music was played, including at bars, churches and for dancing competitions.

Her repertory includes hornpipes, reels, marches, and three kinds of jigs - all associated with dancing, as well as slow airs. While still a child, Liz began composing tunes, and they now number more than 200, many of which are played in sessions around the world and recorded by many of Celtic music’s most famed musicians.

In 1975, Liz, then 18, astounded the Irish music world in both the United States and Ireland by winning the senior division championship title. In accomplishing this feat, she was immediately recognized as one of the most outstanding Irish fiddlers of all time. She has toured as a solo artist and with the Greenfields of America, Trian, String Sisters, and as part of the duo Liz Carroll & John Doyle. She’s featured on ten albums and has appeared on many more. Liz is a recipient of the National Heritage Fellowship Award (1994). In 2010, she became the first Irish-American musician nominated for a Grammy. In 2011, she became the first American-born composer honored with the Cumadóir TG4, Ireland's most significant traditional music prize.

Nicolae Feraru

Since immigrating to the United States, Nicolae Feraru has perpetuated the Gypsy traditional music he learned from his father, and other lautari, or minstrels, in his native Romania.

The second youngest of seven children, Feraru was born in 1950 in Bucharest, Romania, into a musical family. Despite the warning from his father against becoming a musician because of the long, sleepless, weekend-long weddings, Feraru took up the cimbalom anyway, becoming a student of Mitica Ciuciu-Marinescu, one of the leading Romanian performers on the large cimbalom. After achieving the status of muzician, the highest rank awarded to a musician in the Communist system, Feraru was able to work and tour as a musician. For many years, he played in Bucharest restaurants, in well-known ensembles. When a rare opportunity to tour in the Romanian communities in the United States arose in 1988, Feraru travelled to Detroit. He then applied for and was awarded political asylum (he became a U.S. citizen in 2001).

In 1994, he moved to Chicago and was joined two years later by his wife and three sons; his two daughters had to remain behind. Until recently, Feraru worked in a dental equipment factory, while also regularly performing at weddings, community events, and restaurants throughout the Chicago region, including the Chicago World Music Festival. He has performed at various public events and for public officials, including former President Bill Clinton at the 2009 dedication of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. In 2013, Nicolae Feraru was awarded the National Heritage Fellowship, the highest honor that the US government has for masters of traditional arts.