Bill MacKay is an acclaimed guitarist, composer, and improviser based in Chicago whose music ranges freely across the experimental folk, rock, and avant-garde scenes. His creative, unpredictable approach to the guitar is augmented by his original approach to songwriting. He has been recording music since 2004 and is a prolific collaborator with artists across the musical spectrum. He is best known to rock fans as the founder of the bands Sounds of Now, Broken Things, and Darts & Arrows. He described his music loosely as "garage jazz" for 2005's Bill Mackay & Sounds of Now. The set's raw production sensibilities reveal intuitive improvisations, canny group interplay, and influences steeped in rock, blues, and folk, and set the stage for 2007's meld of hard rock and free jazz Swim to the River. MacKay's sideman duties and other projects led to the formation of Darts & Arrows, who issued a pair of albums between 2010 and 2012, before his collaborative projects claimed most of his time. He found time to release a tribute acoustic offering on Tompkins Square, Sunrise: Bill Mackay Plays the Songs of John Hulburt, worked in a duo with Ryley Walker, and in 2017 signed his own deal with Drag City.

MacKay was born in Tarrytown, New York on April 3, 1968. He grew up in Rochester, New York and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of a trumpeter (both parents were fans of Broadway show tunes, classical music, and jazz). His early influences include the Beatles, Frédéric Chopin, John and Alice Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, and Laura Nyro, among others, and his literary influences include beat poets Kenneth Patchen and Jack Kerouac, Edgar Allan Poe, and Antonin Artaud. In Rochester, he briefly studied classical guitar with Kevin Morse, and in Pittsburgh he was in the music program at Chartiers Valley High School from 1982-1984 and Penn Hills High School, graduating in 1986, taking further instruction with guitarists Eric Susoeff and Joe Negri. MacKay attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston for the next two years and took a course in improvisation and composition with pianist, violinist, composer, and singer Alice Orpheus at the New England Conservatory in 2005.

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