Saxophonist and composer Dan Blake is a highly inventive, genre-crossing performer whose work straddles acoustic post-bop and contemporary classical. He first garnered attention in the mid-2000s leading groups and working with artists like Esperanza Spalding, Julian Lage, and Carmen Staaf. He has also gained respect as a wide-ranging composer, writing chamber pieces and multimedia works for groups like the Mivos String Quartet, the Brooklyn-based Threeds oboe trio, and the Paris-based Spring Rolls Quartet, among others. Blake's own albums have found him mixing traditional jazz idioms with modern sounds, as on 2006's The Party Suite, as well as exploring more far-reaching harmonies influenced by the work of Anthony Braxton, as on 2010's The Aquarian Suite and 2021's Da Fé.