A performing/recording artist and educator based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Andrew Bishop utterly avoids a rigidly idiomatic approach to jazz. The saxophonist/clarinetist's wide-ranging perspective has led him to traverse stylistic boundaries in his own projects while forming creative alliances with collaborators across the jazz spectrum, from Midwestern post-boppers to Brooklyn-based avant-gardists and creative improvisers. In his career to date, Bishop has been as likely to play a straight-ahead set on the stage of Ann Arbor's (sadly defunct) Firefly Club as freewheeling improv at Brooklyn's Barbès, or perhaps to lend his talents to an album of cutting-edge modern classical composition. With a fertile imagination and deep polystylistic knowledge, not to mention impressive technical chops, Bishop has emerged as a consistently intriguing artist in the world of modern creative jazz.

Longtime Ann Arbor resident Bishop earned two Bachelor of Music degrees from Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas; other graduates of the WSU music school with whom Bishop would later collaborate included drummer Matt Wilson and banjoist Paul Elwood. Bishop continued his postgraduate education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, earning two Master of Music degrees and finally a Doctor of Musical Arts in composition. As a grad student, Bishop crossed paths with two other musicians at the U-M, Detroit-born drummer Gerald Cleaver and bassist Tim Flood, with whom he would perform and record in his longest-standing ensemble, Bishop/Cleaver/Flood, formed in 1996 and continuing intermittently for two decades. In 1997 Bishop premiered another group, the genre-busting creative jazz-country Hank Williams Project, in a quartet lineup with Wilson, Elwood, and Flood at the inaugural Edgefest, organized by Ann Arbor venue Kerrytown Concert House.

Involved in academia and sideman/collaborative endeavors, Bishop wouldn't release albums by Bishop/Cleaver/Flood or the Hank Williams Project until the mid-2000s. The Bishop/Cleaver/Flood album Time Imaginary Time arrived on Envoi Recordings in 2005, followed by The Hank Williams Project, also on Envoi, in 2006. The former album showcased the reedman's skills on soprano and tenor saxophones and clarinet, with the deeply empathetic involvement of Cleaver and Flood, on a set of Bishop-penned music marrying the unbridled qualities of free jazz to a suite-like modern compositional form; meanwhile, The Hank Williams Project -- with a lineup now featuring Bishop, Cleaver, Flood, Elwood, guitarist Ryan Mackstaller, cellist Katri Ervamaa, violinist Steve Trismen, and vocalist/saxophonist Andy Kirshner -- somehow found a common thread linking Williams chestnuts like "Your Cheatin' Heart" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" with post-bop, free jazz, bluegrass, and even tinges of Indian raga.

After serving as assistant professor of jazz, theory, and composition at Albion College in Albion, Michigan, Bishop joined the University of Michigan faculty as associate professor of jazz and contemporary improvisation. From the start of the new millennium into the mid-2010s, he also continued performing and recording as a sideman, notably included ongoing membership in the Ellen Rowe Quartet and Quintet led by pianist Rowe, professor and chair of the University of Michigan's Department of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation. Bishop contributed to such Rowe albums as Sylvan Way (2001), Denali Pass (2005), Wishing Well (2010), and Courage Music (2014). In addition, as an indication of his unrestricted jazz interests, Bishop appeared on recordings ranging from 2001's Paris Blues by the straight-ahead big band Bird of Paradise Orchestra to the 2006 Envoi recording Push by the avant-garde jazz quartet Bottomed Out.

Bishop also maintained his connection with drummer Cleaver, who departed Michigan for Brooklyn and gained an international reputation as one of the top percussionists in creative improvised music. Playing clarinet and tenor and soprano saxophones on Cleaver's 2001 debut recording as a leader, the Fresh Sound New Talent album Adjust by the drummer's Veil of Names sextet, Bishop appeared alongside the likes of keyboardist Craig Taborn, violist Mat Maneri, guitarist Ben Monder, and bassist Reid Anderson. And in 2006 at Brooklyn's Barbès, Bishop recorded a live set with a Cleaver-led sextet also featuring tenor saxophonist J.D. Allen, trumpeter/flügelhornist Jeremy Pelt, bassist Chris Lightcap, and pianist Ben Waltzer; the results could be heard on Gerald Cleaver's Detroit, released by Fresh Sound New Talent in 2008. In addition, Bishop played soprano sax, alto flute, and bass clarinet on 2012's Mag Mell, an avant jazz-meets-electronica recording by the Tim Flood Quartet, led by bassist Flood (who also tackled mixing and production) and also featuring Cleaver along with pianist Jacob Sacks.

Bishop's third album as a leader -- and second recording by the Bishop/Cleaver/Flood trio -- arrived on Envoi in March 2015. Characteristic of an artist seeking to place jazz in a long chronology of human creative expression, De Profundis, with Bishop featured on flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, and soprano and tenor saxophones, interspersed new, intimately personal compositions with varied reimaginings of a passage from Josquin Des Prez, a 15th and 16th century Renaissance composer whose contrapuntal and polyphonic works have deeply influenced music to the present day. And in May of 2015, Bishop was heard back in the role of a sideman -- playing his massive contrabass clarinet as part of a four-person clarinet section also featuring Ben Goldberg, Oscar Noriega, and Joachim Badenhorst -- on the Clean Feed release Save Your Breath by innovative pianist Kris Davis' Infrasound octet. ~ Dave Lynch, Rovi