Chris Byars joined the Church Street School team as Assistant Director of Tribeca Jazz Institute in January 2025. Chris is a jazz saxophonist and composer who performs with his original sextet at Birdland, Ornithology, and Smalls. His music teaching experience spans five decades and every imaginable setting.

Byars has been invited as a guest artist with the WDR Big Band for eight programs in Cologne, Germany. He has completed 120 music outreach programs in 55 countries around the world in conjunction with United States embassies. SteepleChase Records will release the Chris Byars Sextet’s latest CD The Dark Forest in 2025, their fifth CD as a band and Byars’s seventeenth CD as a leader.

Chris completed his B.M. and M.M. in Jazz Performance Studies at Manhattan School of Music in 1990 and 1992. His interests include distance running, coffee, and science fiction. Chris and his wife Ayna live in Midtown Manhattan and enjoy walks with their Corgi, Sassafras.