Steve Marquette (b.1987, BM DePaul 2010) is a guitarist, improviser and organizer based out of Chicago, IL. He has since become an integral part of the city's storied and vibrant improvised music community touring the United States and Europe in ensembles of his own The Few (with Macie Stewart and Charlie Kirchen) Kobra Quartet (with Anton Hatwich, Aurora Nealand and Paul Thibodeaux), Ibises (with Dan Bitney and Nick Macri), Liminal Rites (with Alison Chesley), the Instigation Orchestra and formerly as a member of Ken Vandermark's Marker. Marquette has had the opportunity to perform with a litany of the leading figures in improvised and creative music including Nels Cline, Chris Corsano, Tim Daisy, Melissa Guion (MJ Guider), Mats Gustafsson’s Fire! Orchestra, Jon Irabagon, Lia Kohl, Joe McPhee, Dave Rempis and Mars Williams. In addition to playing in Mars Williams’ Exit Plan and helping produce his large scale “Devil’s Whistle” project at the Music Box Village in New Orleans, Marquette also serves as a trustee of Williams’archive, housed at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago.

In 2016 he founded, and continues to serve as the lead organizer of, the biannual Instigation Festival - which brings together performers from Chicago and New Orleans for a week of interdisciplinary collaboration in each city. Since then, the Instigation Festival has put on nearly eighty concerts across sixteen festivals. Notable artists to perform at the festival include Joshua Abrams, Hamid Drake, Alvin Fielder, Eric Boern, Kidd Jordan, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Joe McPhee, Rob Mazurek, Michael Moore, Mike Reed, Tomeka Reid, Ken Vandermark and Michael Zerang. The festival has also commissioned new works for the Instigation Orchestra from Jeff Albert (“Social Play Dance Party”), Katinka Kleijn (“Forward Echo”), Lia Kohl (“Emurmuration”) , Rob Mazurek (“Instigation Scores (For Multiple Instruments): Volume I and II”), Aurora Nealand (“The Book of Communal Howling”),Ken Vandermark (“Two Cities Large)”, and Mars Williams’(“The Devil’s Whistle”)