DEREK GRAY (Drums, percussion) Derek is an up-and-coming drummer, percussionist, composer, and educator on the Canadian music scene.

He completed a Bachelor of Contemporary Music at Humber College in 2011, studying with teachers including Steve Mancuso, Pat Labarbera, Larnell Lewis, Brian Dickinson, Ravi Naimpally, Waleed Abdulhamid, and Luis Mario Ochoa. He has also been selected to participate in residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Betty Carter Jazz Ahead program in Washington, DC.

He spent the summer of 2009 in Ghana studying ethnomusicology at the University of Ghana as well as traditional West African hand drumming with master drummers Kwasi Dunyo and Ledzi Agudzemegah. Derek founded the Hand Drumming in the Schools program which presents hand-drumming workshops for students of all ages at schools in the Toronto area. 

In Toronto, Derek works extensively as a bandleader, composer, and sideman performing regularly with a variety of projects, including modern-jazz quintet Tesseract, Gray Matter, and the Indo- Jazz ensemble Monsoon. He has also performed with David Buchbinder, Justin Gray, Dave Holland, Ingrid Jensen, and Pat Labarbera.