The series continues Sunday, December 1, with the Billy Childs Quartet, featuring Childs on piano, Matthew Stubbs on clarinet, Dan Chmielinski on bass, and Benjamin Ring on drums. Multi-Grammy-winner Billy Childs has been a favorite performer on the Athenaeum series going back to his debut at the library in 1996. He remains one of the most diversely prolific and acclaimed artists working in music today. As a composer, he has been commissioned by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the Kronos Quartet, the Dorian Wind Quintet, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the American Brass Quintet, the Ying Quartet, the Lyris Quartet, and Anne Akiko Meyers.

His canon of original compositions and arrangements has garnered him the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a composer’s award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Chamber Music America composer’s grant. Childs has received 17 Grammy nominations and 6 Grammy Awards (2 for Best Instrumental Jazz Album, 2 for Best Instrumental Composition, and 2 for Best Arrangement Accompanying a Vocalist). The Los Angeles Times wrote, “As a pianist, he possesses the improvisatory skills and powerful sense of swing one associates with world-class artists … Childs is an inventive composer and arranger whose efforts in those areas consistently expand the dimension of the jazz genre—and beyond.”