First-place winner of the 2025 Vandoren Emerging Artist Award in Jazz, George Rogers is a saxophonist, composer, teacher, and facilitator from the San Francisco Bay Area, currently based in Northeast Ohio.

Drawing inspiration from a diverse array of genres, Rogers's playing and composing styles blend elements of traditional, modern, and avant-garde jazz, while also embracing influences from experimental, popular, and singer-songwriter music.

Rogers—a mentee of saxophone legends Gary Bartz, Justin Robinson, and Dann Zinn—has performed at venues across the nation, including New York City (Dizzy’s Club, Nublu, Brothers Wash & Dry, Prospect Jams), the Bay Area (SFJAZZ, California Jazz Conservatory, Bird & Beckett, The Backroom, Tom’s Place), Southern California (LIBRETTO, The Stowaway, The Green Room), Northeast Ohio (Oberlin Conservatory, The Feve, Hanson Records, All Things Great, the Cleveland Museum of Art), and in numerous other states, from Vermont to Alaska, as part of diverse programming including the West Oakland Sound Series, Vail Jazz Party, and Concord Jazz Festival. He has performed in settings involving artists such as Wynton Marsalis, Gerald Cannon, Dan Wall, Luis Perdomo, Eva Scow, Zack Brock, Bob Lanzetti,c Soweto Kinch, Bill Nace, and Lorin Benedict.

As a composer, Rogers has had works premiered by various professional ensembles, including HYPERCUBE and performers at New Music On The Point, as well as soloists and ensembles at Oberlin Conservatory. In 2024, he was awarded a Flint Initiative Grant to compose and record EIGHT VIGNETTES for alto saxophone, which premiered in February 2025. His most recent work, unison for alto saxophone and electronics, combines his identities as an improviser, composer, and producer.

Rogers is also a passionate educator and arts administrator dedicated to nurturing inspired musicians and facilitating community engagement. As a part of Bang on a Gong, he worked with El Centro, a non-profit organization in Lorain, OH, to facilitate communal music-making using the Javanese Gamelan. In 2024, Rogers served as the Development and Community Outreach Coordinator for the Sitka Fine Arts Camp. Most recently, he led a program at the Allen Memorial Art Museum where 4th-graders learned about graphic scores and illustrated their own, which were then performed by professional improvising musicians in a public performance. In 2025, Rogers was awarded the Gletherow-Young-Deppman Project Award in support of New Sound Lab, a free improvisation and composition ensemble for high school students in Northeast Ohio that will launch in January 2026.

Though occasionally traveling to San Francisco and New York City, Rogers currently resides in Oberlin, OH, where he offers in-person and remote lessons in saxophone, improvisation, and composition.