This quartet grew out of a celebrated collaborative trio whose 2020 debut, General Semantics, drew critical acclaim from Downbeat and NPR's Fresh Air for its adventurous, democratic approach to improvised music. In 2025, the group welcomed pianist Myra Melford, whose long-standing duo partnership with Ben Goldberg made the chemistry immediate.

Myra Melford, a Guggenheim Fellow, professor at UC Berkeley, and stalwart of the new-jazz movement, was born and raised in the Chicago area, making her addition feel less like an expansion than a homecoming. Ben Goldberg, one of the most inventive clarinetists in contemporary jazz, consistently places among the top clarinetists in DownBeat's Critics' Poll and brings a restless creative vision spanning radical klezmer reinvention to ambitious song cycles. Drummer Dana Hall is a Chicago institution: Associate Dean of the DePaul University School of Music, former Artistic Director of the Chicago Jazz Ensemble, and a Chicago Tribune Chicagoan of the Year. Saxophonist and bandleader Geof Bradfield, co-founder of Calligram Records and a professor at Northern Illinois University, has been named a Rising Star saxophonist and arranger by DownBeat, a DCASE Esteemed Artist, and an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellow, and has been a central figure in Chicago's creative music scene for two decades.

The quartet convened at the legendary Green Mill to record Open or Close, a program of new music contributed by each member of the group, forthcoming this fall on Calligram Records.