It's 10:00 a.m.; I'm still waking up, yet Amy Denio is awake and quite animated on the phone, despite a round of lightning-quick trips to gigs in Rome and Taipei.

My conversation with Denio reminds me that she is among the busiest composers in these parts. When she's not creating sound scores for assorted choreographers (notably Pat Graney), Denio collaborates with a host of musicians here in Seattle and in Italy. She's an excellent multi-instrumentalist (mainly saxophone, voice, and accordion), arranger, and composer, so I'm not surprised when we detour into her plans to work with a 30-piece Taiwanese samba percussion corps early next year. "They want me to help them integrate samba—believe it or not, there's actually a samba scene over there—with indigenous Taiwanese music," Denio explains.

She also reminds me that the Tiptons have been around for close to two decades, mostly as the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet. The group's moniker honors saxophonist and pianist Billy Tipton, a woman who passed herself off as a man for 50 years, possibly to earn a living in the male-dominated music business. "We wanted to honor someone who had chosen to follow a very difficult path in life to play music," states Denio.

I've heard the group several times in their incarnation as the BTMSQ and as the Tiptons since the early '90s; they're fun and they make fresh-sounding jazz. Along with saxophonist Jessica Lurie, the sax quartet plus drums serves up driving, frenetic riffs in unusual yet still funky meters derived from Balkan and Mediterranean music. Denio tells me, "We'll probably play some tunes by Sun Ra and Clifford Brown, and we'll definitely include an arrangement from Puglia in southern Italy." It's called Sind' and "has a 17-beat phrase that swings."