David Bindman is a saxophonist, multi-reed instrumentalist, and composer. His recordings include, with the Brooklyn Sax Quartet, The Way of the Saxophone and Far Side of Here, and, with the David Bindman Sextet, Sunset Park Polyphony and Ten Billion Versions of Reality. He has collaborated with poet Tyrone Henderson and visual artist Quimetta Perle on the multi-media works “The Madman” and “Strawman Dance” and with Malin Abrahamsson on the “Dream Space Continuum,” a work of music and abstract animation. David has performed, toured and/or recorded with Adam Lane’s Full Throttle Orchestra, Kevin Norton, Ehran Elisha, Joe Fonda, Scott D. Miller, Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, and Fred Ho, among many others. David appears in the film “We are One” with the quartet Blood Drum Spirit. Led by drummer royal Hartigan, the quartet has performed and conducted workshops throughout the USA and in China, the Philippines, and Ghana, including on tours sponsored by the U.S. State Department. David has taught in the New York City school system, for the Consortium for Worker Education, and at Bennington College and The New School. He has received grants from the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Queens Council on the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, Meet The Composer, and The Aaron Copland Fund for Music Performing Ensembles. David currently divides his time between Brooklyn, New York and North Bennington, Vermont.

Longer bio:

David was born in New York City in 1963. He began playing violin at five, at ten switched to alto sax, then played drums. Early on, music was all around at home, from the sounds of Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Roberta Flack and John Coltrane to the musicians he saw perform in his hometown of Englewood, NJ, including Dizzy Gillespie. These sounds were, for David, indelibly connected with the values his mother Ellen embodied through her peace and human rights activism and teaching.

In 1977, living with his grandparents in Vermont, having begun exploring improvisation on his own, David began playing with fellow high school students, pianist Jim Sugarman and drummer Ben Wittman. David studied briefly with saxophonist Sigurd Rascher and then with saxophonist Stephen Horenstein. Introduced to the music community at Bennington College, he became part of trumpeter/composer Arthur Brooks' ensemble, and, during his last year in high school, received a scholarship to take a class with trumpeter/composer Bill Dixon.

As an undergraduate at Wesleyan University in the early 1980s, David studied with saxophonist Bill Barron, trombonist Bill Lowe and others in Wesleyan's World Music Department. He became a member of Talking Drums, led by master drummers Abraham Adzenyah and Freeman Donkor. The group toured the US and released the LP Some Day Catch Some Day Down (Shanachie, 1987, reissued as a CD on Innova in 2011). During this time David was also a member of the collective quartet JUBA, with bassist Wes Brown, drummer royal hartigan, and Bill Lowe, and Wadada Leo Smith's New Dalta Ahkri.

In the early 1990s he collaborated with poet Tyrone Henderson and visual artist Quimetta Perle on the The Madman, Strawman Dance, and other multi-media works, with performances at P.S. 122, the Nuyorican Poets Café, the Knitting Factory and other venues in New York and New England, and in Manchester, UK. The CD Strawman Dance was released on Konnex in 1994. David also led his trio with Kevin Norton and Joe Fonda (Imaginings, CIMP, 1997) and co-founded the Brooklyn Sax Quartet with Fred Ho. The BSQ released two CDs, The Way of the Saxophone (Innova, 2001) and Far Side of Here (Omnitone, 2005). The quartet included, at different times, Sam Furnace, Chris Jonas, John O'Gallager, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Ned Rothernberg, Sam Newsome, and many guest performers. The BSQ toured the western USA and Canada, performed David's arrangement of Hector Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet live on WNYC's Soundcheck with John Schaefer and at Joe's Pub at the Public Theater, and performed often at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's BAM Café. During this time David appeared on recordings with Fred Ho, Kevin Norton, Ehran Elisha, Joe Fonda, Scott D. Miller, Anthony Braxton, and others. He toured with Fred Ho's Afro-Asian Music Ensemble and Monkey Orchestra, performing at BAM, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, the Atlanta Arts Festival, the Seattle Children's Festival, and the Guggenheim Museum, among other venues.

The collaboration between Wes Brown, royal hartigan, and David Bindman, joined in 2003 by pianist Art Hirahara, continues today under hartigan's leadership as Blood Drum Spirit. The quartet released three double CDs, Time Changes (2019), Live in China (2008) and Blood Drum Spirit (2000), and conducted numerous educational residencies in the USA and abroad. The group's 2015 collaborations with Ghanaian musicians, dancers, singers, and poets, the histories of the quartet's members, and the connections of jazz with West African music/culture, are the subjects of the documentary film We Are One, directed by Sara Pettenilla. In 2017, Blood Drum Spirit toured Ghana for a second time, sponsored by the U.S. State Department. This tour included new collaborations, film screenings, discussions, and performances. The group has also performed in China, the Philippines, Trinidad and across the US.

In 2006 David began composing a series of extended suites for sextet. He has since self-released two CDs by the David Bindman Sextet, Sunset Park Polyphony (2012) and Ten Billion Versions of Reality (2017). The group has performed in New York and New England and conducted residencies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
David's recent collaborations include work with visual artist Malin Abrahamsson on the music/abstract animation Human Diaspora: The Dream Space Continuum, screened at UMass Dartmouth in 2016. In 2018 David performed in Jerusalem with Stephen Horenstein's Lab Orchestera, and, in Tel Aviv, a concert of his sextet compositions, joined by five Israeli musicians. The concert included a reunion duet with Horenstein. In 2019, David began collaborating with drummer Michael Sarin and mallet percussionist Stefan Bauer. The first performance by their Relative Motion Trio took place at ShapeShifter's Lab in Brooklyn in fall 2019. The trio released the CD Relative Motion in 2022.

David was born in 1963 in New York City. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1985 and received an MA in World Music from Wesleyan in 1987. He has received grants from the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Queens Council on the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, Meet The Composer, and The Aaron Copland Fund for Music Performing Ensembles. He has taught in the New York City school system, Bennington College, LaGuardia Community College, and The New School University, and has conducted or assisted in master classes throughout the USA and in Canada. In addition to his work in music, he designs curriculum and teaches union members in NYC under the auspices of the Consortium for Worker Education.