Speed up a thirty minute humpback whale song and it sounds like a mockingbird song. Slow down the sound of a nightingale and it turns into a whale. What better way to understand what animals are singing than to jam along with them? Improvisers are always ready to reach out to new kinds of music. With this unique music event, Lewis Porter and David Rothenberg will try something new: interspecies jazz.

Dr. Lewis Porter is a jazz pianist and Professor of Music at Rutgers University in Newark, where he directs the Master's program in jazz history. He is known worldwide for his teaching and for his many books and articles, especially John Coltrane: His Life and Music. He has written numerous articles and liner notes, and edits a book series and a scholarly journal. He has performed recently with such artists as Wycliffe Gordon, Ravi Coltrane, and Jane Ira Bloom. He performed in Europe in 2007 with Dave Liebman and others, and he is a member of the group Dharma Jazz, with Badal Roy and Vic Juris. His latest CD, recorded live at Siena Jazz, is Italian Encounter. Jazz Times recently described Porter as "a helluva pianist."

David Rothenberg is a philosopher and musician. He is the author of Why Birds Sing, which has been published in Italy, Spain, Taiwan, China, Korea, and Germany, and turned into a feature documentary for the BBC. Rothenberg is also the author of Hand's End: Technology and the Limits of Nature and Always the Mountains. His most recent book is Thousand Mile Song, about making music with whales. Rothenberg's music is inspired by the melodies and beats of birds, insects, whales, water, and wind. He blends spontaneous musical inventiveness with a sense of rhythm, exhuberance, and listening to nature. As a clarinetist Rothenberg has performed and recorded with Jan Bang, Scanner, Glen Velez, Karl Berger, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. He has seven CDs out under his own name, including On the Cliffs of the Heart, named one of the top ten releases of 1995 by Jazziz magazine. His first CD on ECM Records, a duet album with pianist Marilyn Crispell, will appear in 2009. Rothenberg is a professor of music and philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.