IF Archive 2020

Greece

acte vide

acte vide is co-presented by the Onassis Foundation. 

day-to-day

Danae Stefanou – inside piano, objects
Yannis Kotsonis – amplified objects, feedback

Active since 2006, Greek electroacoustic duo acte vide persistently explores noise and silence in ever-changing real-time formations, usually unrecorded, and often in ad-hoc dialogue with other musicians, visual artists, and directors. Past commissions include collaborations with Vicki Bennett and Tarek Atoui, as well as live improvised soundtracks for Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and early French animation films. The duo also organizes improvisation and active listening workshops for children and adults in Athens and Thessaloniki, as well as residencies on sound art and site-specific sonic experimentation on the island of Syros, Greece.

Denmark/Germany

Adam Pultz Melbye

Adam Pultz Melbye is co-presented by the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Belfast.

Adam Pultz Melbye is a Danish double bass player, composer, improviser and PhD-researcher at Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast. Adam has a long-standing fascinating with double bass resonance and the development of new techniques for the instrument. He has released three solo albums, appears on roughly 40 additional albums, and has performed in the US, Europe, Japan and Australia. Recently, his work has often involved adaptive sound processing systems and double bass-specific feedback networks.

attics for all, floors for none

Attics for all, floors for none is an ongoing work that was initiated during lockdown in Berlin. Recently, I have become interested in how software can make sense of itself rather than just respond to the input of the performer. The patch I am improvising with here has its own strict and non-random behavioural logic based in part on it responding to its own output, rather than my input. It is rarely entirely clear to me how it will behave and, as such, improvising with this kind of algorithm is a precarious enterprise and an ongoing negotiation of texture and resonance. The performance was filmed in the attic above my flat in Berlin—a lovely space (apart from the pigeon droppings) that will be the closest thing I will have to a venue in the coming months.

Ontario, Canada

Ajay Heble

Ajay Heble is the Director of the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph, and Artistic Director Emeritus of the Guelph Jazz Festival. He founded the Festival in 1994 and served as its Artistic Director until 2016. Under his visionary leadership, The Guelph Jazz Festival—winner of the 2010 Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and a three-time recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award of the Arts (1997, 2000, 2001)–has achieved an international reputation as one of the world’s most inspired and provocative musical events. Heble is also an accomplished pianist with a long background as a performer. His first CD, a live set of improvised music called Different Windows with percussionist Jesse Stewart, was released on the IntrepidEar label in 2001. Heble has also participated as a musician in concerts and recordings in support of a range of charitable organizations. He has performed or recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Eddie Prévost, Jane Bunnett, John Heward’s Murray Street Band, Lori Freedman, Scott Merritt, Douglas Ewart, Dong-Won Kim, Richard Underhill, Matt Brubeck, and many others. As a pianist, Heble’s recent recordings include Hold True (Accroche-Toi) and The Time of the Sign, both with his improvising quartet The Vertical Squirrels (on the Ambiances Magnétiques label).

Isolation Postcard #3

The solo piano improvisation included here is one of a series of “Isolation Postcards” created during the current pandemic. This piece is offered in memory of Ajay’s father.

Mexico

Alain Derbez & Mauricio Sotelo

IMPROVIZADO: SENFINECO DE MARO

Improvizado. Senfineco de maro, kiu trenas nin, de maro, kiu nin trafas. Senfina la maro, kiu batas nin, tio markas vin, markas vin, tio trankviligas vin, resanigas min, liberigas nin. Improvizado. Malfinio de maro: Malfinio: flugu kaj marŝu ĝin ĉio.

Improvisación. Infinitud de un mar que nos arrastra, de un mar que nos engulle. Infinitud la mar que nos hechiza, que te demarca, marca, que te alivia, me sana, nos libera. Improvisación. Infinitud de un mar: Infinitud: volar y caminarla todos.

Improvisation. Infinitude d’une mer qui nous entraîne, d’une mer qui nous engloutit. Infinitude la mer qui nous ensorcelle, qui vous marque, vous marque, qui vous soulage, me guérit, nous libère. Improvisation. Infinitude d’une mer: Infini: volez et marchez tout.

Improvisation. Infinitude of a sea that drags us, of a sea that engulfs us. Infinitude of the sea that bewitches us, that demarks you, marks you, that relieves you, heals me, frees us. Improvisation. Infinitude of a sea: Infinitude: fly and walk it all.

With no fear… Sin miedo… Sans peur…

Sen timo… Sen timo… Sen timo

Italy

Alessandro Fedrigo

Alessandro Fedrigo is a specialist of the fretless bass guitar, using both electric and acoustic types and even using sound effects to modify this instrument’s sound. For him, the importance of researching a peculiar sound is crucial. Alessandro has played jazz, free improvisation, experimental music, and electronic music. He has explored multimedia performances and recorded more than 30 CDs, including 2 albums of solo bass. He was named one of the best Italian bass players by JAZZiT magazine. Alessandro is co-leader with Nicola Fazzini of the renowned XYQuartet, and, since 2011, he has been the Artistic Director of nusica.org, an independent, digital, ecological, and conceptual label. He is also the curator of Sile Jazz Festival in Treviso which offers site-specific concerts.

Mus Musculus

During this lockdown, I decided to explore some software I was not used to. I’ve always been interested in electronic music and most of all on improvising with software/ computers.

The questions I’m trying to answer are: Is the computer just a tool or is it an inspiration for my improvisation? How do I react on what the computer does? Am I trying to control it or am I trying to explore with it some new aspects/options of creativity and improvisation? Having said that, I also found that with software/computer/web, I could have some very inspiring relationship with artists around the world, and this has been really helpful in this period of isolation. That’s why I accepted Ajay’s invitation with great pleasure.

Iran

Ali & Mohammad Yazdanpanah

Persian Santoor and Tombak Improvisation

Ali Yazdanpanah was born in 1975 in Shiraz, Iran. He has graduated as a Santoor (Persian dulcimer) from the music department of the University of Guilan. Ali has been focusing on teaching Santoor to children as well as adults at the Yazdanpanah music school for many years.

Mohammad Yazdanpanah was born in 1981 in Shiraz, Iran. He is a Tombak (Persian percussion) player who has graduated from the music department of the Azad University of Shiraz. Mohammad, like his brothers, has been concentrating on children’s music education at the Yazdanpanah music school.

Ontario, Canada

Alison Melville & Colin Savage

Lowdown

Colin Savage has been principal clarinetist with the Mississauga Symphony for 30 years, and regularly performs on recorder and historical clarinets with a wide variety of chamber and orchestral ensembles in Southern Ontario. He has toured Japan and performed in the Royal Opera House at Versailles with Opera Atelier; and worked with Tafelmusik, Canadian Opera Company, Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Consort. Colin’s interest in analog photographic processes finds him in well-lit and very dark places.

Alison Melville’s career as a soloist, chamber and orchestral musician on historical flutes has taken her across North America, New Zealand, Japan and Europe. Alison is a member of the Toronto Consort, appears frequently with Tafelmusik, and has guested with numerous other early and new music ensembles. Her playing has been heard on numerous film, video and TV soundtracks, on radio across North America, Europe and Australasia, and on over 65 CDs, including five critically acclaimed solo recordings. In other news, she is a novice printmaker and veteran tea drinker. www.alisonmelville.com

Alison and Colin particularly enjoy playing with the Arctic fusion band Ensemble Polaris, whose recordings of Nordic/Canadian/Mediterranean genre-bending music have received international critical acclaim and delighted audiences across Canada.

Mexico

Ana Ruiz

Ana Ruiz is a pianist and composer dedicated to improvisation and a pioneer of free jazz in Mexico since 1973. She created the group Atrás del Cosmos, the first free jazz group in Mexico. While performing with the group Atrás del Cosmos, Don Cherry was invited to play and teach the Organic Music Workshop, culminating with three concerts at the National Auditorium. She met Terry Riley and played the vibraphone in the play “In C.” Ruiz is a composer of music for videos, films, and choreography. She played the harmonium at Bellas Artes with Sunanda Patnaik and Swapan Chauduri, and recently created the groups Free Jazz Women and Cihuatl.

Prepared Piano

It is an honor to be invited to this improvisation festival. This festival dignifies work and life itself. The improviser expresses his day to day as a musician and as a human being. Improvisation starts from the sound and mental silence and expresses that moment beyond all that it knows and feels. Ephemeral art music creates in the listener something that he does not understand and that makes him feel what he has never experienced. Grateful with life.

Ontario, Canada

Andrew Craig

Andrew Craig is a true Renaissance man in the arts: singer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, producer, director, broadcaster, playwright, impresario, and content creator. He is engaged in a broad range of activities in several areas of new media, including live performance, radio and television production, scoring for picture, and music theatre. Recognized as a leading cultural thinker, Andrew is frequently asked to offer his guidance and consultation to organizations such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Faculty of Fine Arts at York University, and the Toronto and Ontario Arts Councils.

He is a former resident artist at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, and a former member of the Board of Directors of Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. As a radio host and producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s national live concerts programs, Craig showcased the remarkable breadth and depth of Canadian musical talent, over the national airwaves and to the world via the Internet, for nearly a decade. He is the recipient of York University’s Bryden Award in 2006, and the 2009 African-Canadian Achievement Award for Excellence In The Arts.

In 2013, Andrew founded Culchahworks Arts Collective, a vibrant Toronto-based arts organization that develops and produces works and social justice programmes with deep cultural resonance. Culchahworks produced the Toronto commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the March of Washington, and Dr. Martin Luther King’s historic “I Have A Dream” speech, which received national media coverage.

Berceuse

When the pandemic hit, our screens were filled with accounts of the heroism of doctors, nurses, and other front-line workers. Even custodial workers, often ignored, suddenly enjoyed a new wave of appreciation. Artists, however, were not considered essential, yet so many people survived the worst of the lockdown by delving deeply into music, film, and the explosion of artistic activity that migrated online virtually overnight.

Artists too, I feel, wished to have more agency, to be a part of the solution. I felt I could contribute to the healing, in a less tangible, but equally meaningful way. I pledged to provide two hours a day of calming, soothing improvised piano music. At 9:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m., for 29 days, I made a musical offering which I entitled “Placid Piano for Pandemics.” The aim was to directly address the tremendously heightened levels of anxiety so much of the world was experiencing.

The piece I’ve offered for this Festival was taken from that suite. It is my hope that the gentle, undulating left-hand ostinato will feel like a lullaby for you, enable you to feel grounded, and calm your spirit, as only music can.

Nova Scotia, Canada

Andrew MacKelvie

Andrew MacKelvie is a practising saxophonist and improviser. A pupil of Jerry Granelli and the Creative Music Workshop, Andrew has been involved in the Halifax improvised music community for the past decade as student, performer, presenter, administrator, educator, and ambassador as he has travelled across the country and abroad making music. He won the inaugural Paul Cram award, presented by Upstream Music Association, in January 2020. He is a student at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, studying music education.

Expansive Identity Crisis

Expansive Identity Crisis is, in reflection, about the rapid uploading of our identities into digital society, a process hastened in reaction to the physical isolation restrictions which have forced people to interact with one another online now more than ever before. When I think about myself 98 days into isolation I wonder about where I end and my online presence begins. Personally, it is challenging to reconcile the perception of intimacy in digital communication with the actual physical distance “IRL.”

In isolation, I have been improvising with effects processors I created in Max 8, some of which I can control fully and others that interact with me randomly, along with randomly sequencing sound generators to cope with the loss of my main social event, making music in an ensemble.

Photo by Gavin Harvey

USA

Anna Homler and Jorge Martin

Anna Homler is a vocal and visual artist based in Los Angeles. She has performed and exhibited her work in venues around the world. With a sensibility that is both ancient and post-modern, Homler sings in an improvised melodic language. Her work explores alternative means of communication and the poetics of ordinary things. She creates perceptual interventions by using language as music and objects as instruments.

By day, Jorge Martin is a human genetics/orthopaedic surgery researcher (UCLA). At night, he transforms into a well-respected sound artist. Though classically trained on piano and clarinet, he is more often heard constructing intricate music by processing the output from his modular analog synthesizer panels through a myriad of effect pedals and feedback. He was one half of the acclaimed duo Spastic Colon, and one fifth of the band, Sleestak. Currently, he is a member of the Southern California Soundscape Ensemble, a collaboration involved in making and playing back field recordings, and plays in a duo with vocalist Anna Homler.

The Green Room

This live recording of Anna Homler and Jorge Martin was taken at Anna’s home in Los Angeles. The performance was held in a small oasis outside in a patio, during protests against police violence against Black lives and while observing strict quarantine protocols. Audio and video recording by Jorge Martin.

USA

annais linares

annais is a musician and multimedia social practice artist interested in working alongside under-served communities and communities of color in imagining and engaging ideas of collective future realities through sound and movement. her most recent pursuits have been developing sound and body exploration classes in her Coachella Valley (California) hometown, and helping facilitate community programming with the Wyld Womxn Collective. she looks forward to helping build a collective future full of intention and imagination through art-making, improvising, and socially gathering in the new age.

anger is energy

anger is energy is a piece incorporating distorted womxn’s voices expressing their angers. over time, the voices become clearer — once one has had a chance to “examine your defenses.” the questions and commentary i offer throughout the video are similar to what i have been trying to address in my own life. amidst all of the narratives of change currently surrounding me, i find it important to meet my initial defenses and biases with clarity and self-questioning. where did i learn how to perceive particular phenomenon? at what cost do i quietly move forward without examining my circumstances and the circumstances of others? though we can find power in community, learning ourselves will shape our focus. this piece combines 5 voices with effects. i ask you to examine your defenses when listening to others, and find the clarity of meaning by recognizing your own patterns of distortion, especially when angry and dealing with other people’s anger.

Ontario, Canada

Anne Bourne

Composer Anne Bourne creates interdisciplinary work from field recordings, emergent streams of cello, voice, and words. Anne imparts the text scores and listening practice of renowned composer Pauline Oliveros for collective creative experience. Seasoned in international intermedia performance, choreographic improvisation, and song, Anne is in slow creation process with Ione US, Eve Egoyan and Mauricio Pauly, Kara Lis Coverdale, Silvia Tarozzi IT, tUkU, and Dubmorphology, UK. A 2019-20 Chalmers Fellow, Anne researches sound fields, sonic ethnography, and voice at the threshold of nature and technology, walking shorelines, most recently as 2020 MMM_MM artist in residence in Geneva. Anne imagines ways to experience equanimity and evolution through creative expression, sonic activism and listening.

Photo credit: Aleksandar Antonijevic

Brandon Miguel Valdivia is an experimental composer, who improvises on kit percussion and bamboo flutes. A drummer known for improvisatory work with Not the Wind Not the Flag and Mas Aya; composition in theatre and dance; and recording with artists such as U.S.Girl, Tribe Called Red, and 2018 Polaris winner Jeremy Dutcher. Brandon is a core creative collaborator with renowned international artist and activist Lido Pimienta, and through this work, has made a practice at the intersection of indigenous musics with contemporary. Brandon is passionate about musical and interdisciplinary work that is innovative, inclusive and which endorses cross cultural dialogue and understanding.

Alabaster IV

First there was silence, then the birds returned, followed by the uprising.

I place a pomegranate under a low branch on the cedar, terms of encounter and step back

I put a mic outside to record when I hear the cardinal song, high in the Locust tree

It records the tension between human and more than human sound; migratory birds, the truck retreating from the hospice in the lane behind the garden, a medical evacuation helicopter, my cello locked in its case.

By chance on the day I listen to my field recording of Sukhawat Ali, I forget the recorder is on for hours, the microphone catches the cardinal and me listening to this synchronicity, piped into the hall of the Tate Modern, Aniruddha Das and Gary Stewart a live mix on the racialized history of protest, for 1000 children.

I write them.

The sound of a river I long for comes from Assaf, below Sacred Guardian Buffalo mountain

a river that I have stood beside, stepped into

I listen for what is my place now, locked down integrated urban sound field

I am imperfection

I notice a new sense of time overlapping, expanding like currents flow

I articulate time with my bow

In asynchronous improvisation

Brandon throws a pulse like skipping stones across a body of water

Light shines like an alabaster stone floor to walk on

through interstitial dawn.

©annebourne/ IF2020

Composer / cello improvisations / field recordings / video / recorded and mixed by Anne Bourne
Percussion improvised / recorded by Brandon Valdivia

Grateful acknowledgement: Sukhawat Ali field recording by permission of Aniruddha Das and Gary Stewart; Ajay Heble, Assaf Shatil field recording of the Bow River

Germany

Antonis Anissegos

Antonis Anissegos is co-presented by the Onassis Foundation. 

Antonis Anissegos (1970) has been living as a composer, pianist, improviser, and electronic musician (alias “unu”) in Berlin since 1998. He has performed concerts in Europe, Asia, the USA, and Central America.

Anissegos is a member of the Trio IAMA, the groups Blindsight, Grix, KAYA (with butoh-dancer Yuko Kaseki), ΣΩΜΑ, Card Castle, best before unu, and The Forestry Commission, and he has appeared as a guest with several established ensembles including Ensemble Adapter, Novoflot, European Music Project, and Berlin PianoPercussion. He collaborated with the video artist Erika Matsunami (OIO, 2005–2009), the dance group adLibdances (2007–2011), and Theater Thikwa (2004–present).

From 2006–2018, he taught Improvisation at the Summer Workshops “Music Village” in Greece. His solo chamber orchestra and stage works were performed by Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Piandaemonium, Ensemble Mosaik, Ensemble LUX:NM, Ensemble Resonanz, Ensemble DissonArt, State Orchestra of Thessaloniki, Colour Orchester of Athens, Youth Philharmonic Thüringen, Philharmonic Orchestra of Magdeburg, Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra Brasov, and the Württembergische Philharmonic, among others. He has also released more than 70 CDs.

Solo

At first, the Lock Down in Berlin felt like prolonged home vacations that couldn’t find an end. It was a long period filled with massive amounts of input, lots of reading, watching, and listening, following a rather intense period of output and activities. This led to a short solo recording session, that will become soon my next solo release. The video clip is a document from this session.

British Columbia, Canada

Aram Bajakian & Julia Ulehla

Vocalist Julia Ulehla and guitarist Aram Bajakian’s project Dálava is an homage to traditional Moravian (Czech) folksong, sourcing melodies transcribed over 100 years ago by Julia’s great-grandfather, and reanimating them in an extremely stirring, avant-garde, post-rock musical language. Comprised of a group of stellar musicians from Vancouver, Dálava’s release The Book of Transfigurations (Songlines, 2017) has garnered critical acclaim. “Every now and then an album appears that is so overwhelming and so intense that it is hard to put into any category. Such is the case with The Book of Transfigurations…Saying that TBOT is a masterpiece is not an exaggeration” (Bas Springer, fRoots). “It’s astonishing music—and the story behind its creation is emblematic of how Old World traditions can be born again, thousands of miles and several generations away from their roots” (Alex Varty, Georgia Straight). “The album is not so much a fusion, more an exciting collision of tradition with experimentation, one that will equally appeal to fans of folk, avantgarde improv and jazz” (Jo Frost, Songlines Magazine). In performance and on recording, the “incandescent” (Musicworks) Dálava delves into deep territory—conjuring ancestors, animating spirits, and crafting musical microcosms around the gem-like folk melodies.

Photo by Emma Joelle.

British Columbia, Canada

Balot and Jonathan

Balot and Jonathan are co-presented by the Suoni per il Popolo Festival

Jonathan Adams is an electronic musician and ethnomusicologist. To date, he has spent 5+ years in Indonesia, including a one-year stay (2007/2008) supported by the Darmasiswa scholarship and a four-year stay (2013–2017) researching seven-tone ritual music, assisting the School for International Training, and co-founding Insitu Recordings—a transnational initiative that uses the medium of recording to create novel ways to engage with music.

I Putu Gede Sukaryana (Balot), began taking gamelan seriously when he enrolled at the high school arts conservatory at the age of 15. By the time he completed his arts education in Bali, he had been invited to lead several high-caliber international collaborations, including reworks of Scarlatti and Bach for Yantra Productions (Italy), experiments with Lithuanian electronic musician Paulius Kilbauskas, and collaborative compositions with American composer Wayne Vitale. In 2016, he co-founded the record label and arts collective Insitu Recordings with Jonathan Adams. In 2017, he accepted a visiting artist residency at the University of British Columbia, and began pursuing a Master’s degree in Ethnomusicology.

Swarm

Swarm was created using a combination of Balinese pencon, contact microphones, Pure Data patches, synthesizers, and a sensor co-designed with 3D Labs in Sankt Georgen, Germany during a Global Forest residency in 2017. The piece is part of their ongoing experimentation involving gamelan instruments interfaced with computer patches called Aliranakal, and includes a combination of aleatoric processes, elements of improvisation, and new pencon techniques. Each time the piece is realized a different result is produced.

Ontario, Canada

Ben Finley

Ben Finley is a performer-composer specializing in acoustic bass and electric bass (in multiple tunings and with effects). He grew up on a music festival farm, witnessing many ecosystems of music making. Ben founded and facilitates the Westben Centre for Connection & Creativity’s international/multi-generational Performer-Composer Residency. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and the Performer-Composer program at CalArts, and he is a current PhD student of Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph, studying music practices as sites of cultural-environmental sustainability.

unlearn unlearn unlearn

I improvised the bass part a few nights following the tragic murder of George Floyd. Considering the asymmetrical and unjust systems of oppression that led to Mr. Floyd’s passing, I ask: how can we cocreate and reimagine liveable communities for all of us—that serve all of us and future generations? What unlearning is necessary?

The video footage came from a walk on the Marden Tract—just a few minutes outside of Guelph, Ontario. I thank the birch trees and life-dense wetlands of Ontario for their company during COVID-19.

USA

Bitches Set Traps

The virtuoso musicians of Bitches Set Traps push the boundaries of improvisation by exploring current events, feminism, misogyny, and performance taboos, in theatrical and comedic performances. Using instruments, voices, and common household items, BST recycles and questions everyday tropes of American culture, from tampon commercials to heavy metal power ballads, Eminem to Supreme Court briefs, Joan Didion to Frank Sinatra.

The Bitches crossover venues and genres bringing together ideas between subcultures; they set traps in concert halls, nightclubs, theaters, and galleries with equal intensity. BST formed in 2018 as the North Texas Feminist Improvising Group, inspired by the original Feminist Improvising Group of the late 1970’s. BST recently released their first album, Sexist Instruments, on Bandcamp. BST is Sarah Ruth Alexander, Elizabeth McNutt, and Kourtney Newton.

Mask On

To sustain our creative collaboration during the pandemic, we are creating short videos of socially distanced performances on themes of women’s lives in quarantine, finding humor in the struggles and incongruities of the situation.

Ontario, Canada

Blunderspublik

Pareidolia

With over 20 years experience in sound design, editing, and music composition, Curtis Walker (a.k.a. Blunderspublik) has written and recorded music and sound for film, podcasts, dance, and live performance. The “spublik sound” is a blurring of synthetic & organic sound sources translated to binary code, sculpted, and organized into complex structures and narratives. The end result is a dense, architectural soundfield that respects musical confines while moving outside their borders. Recent explorations have included ambient modular synthesis under the moniker Murmurer.

Ontario, Canada

Bob Wiseman

One Cell to Another

Bob Wiseman is a multiple Juno award recipient and Governor General Media Arts Nominee. His recent projects include scoring Rasputin (produced by Jim Henson productions) and publishing the memoir Music Lessons with ECW Press. Some career highlights: being kissed by Odetta, head butted by Wesley Willis, added by David Byrne to his influential playlist, and accompanying Meryl Streep in the final scene of Postcards From The Edge. He believes Sun Ra is in fact from Saturn.

Ontario, Canada

Brent Rowan & Nicole Lalonde

Music and Movement Meeting in Quarantine

Husband and wife Nicole Lalonde & Brent Rowan have found new ways to blend Nicole’s belly dance training with Brent’s jazz improvisation training to create improvisations focused on creating in-the-moment movement and sound by reacting to each other. The COVID quarantine has provided an opportunity for Brent & Nicole to further explore improvisations in this format.

Brent Rowan is a professional community musician. Brent has performed in festivals and recorded all across Canada, the UK, and Germany. He has released three recordings of his own compositions: It’s About Time (2006), IZ (2012), and Where is Local (2016). He is the founding director of the Guelph Youth Jazz Ensemble and the New Horizons Band for Guelph, and he teaches in the Community Music Program at Wilfrid Laurier University. Brent holds an MA in Community Music from Wilfrid Laurier University, a BA in Music from Humber College, and a BA in Mathematics from the University of Waterloo. Brent is an MA/PhD candidate in Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph.

Nicole started learning Belly Dance in 2002 in Guelph with Hiba. In 2006, Nicole moved to Toronto where she attended classes and workshops at Arabesque Academy, Habeeba’s Egyptian Bellydance Studio, and BellyUp in Oakville. In 2012, Nicole became an apprentice of the Invoketress Dance troupe and became an official member in 2013. She has since been an active troupe member, not only performing but also choreographing troupe pieces and teaching workshops at events. In 2019, Nicole obtained certification in Deb Rubin’s Dance Therapeutics, Level 1. In addition to being part of the Invoketress Dance troupe, she also owns her own costuming, alterations, and upcycling business, Guelph Custom Costumes.

Ontario, Canada

Carey West & Jeff Wilson

Carey West and Jeff Wilson have been collaborating consistently since 2000 on a range of musical projects, including raising a daughter. Carey is a vocalist, songwriter and researcher who was inspired after a long stint as an elementary music teacher to research questions surrounding voice, agency, and improvisation. She is currently enrolled in the Critical Studies in Improvisation PhD program. She continues to perform and record. Her latest album, Made of Clay, was recorded and mixed by Wilson and released in the fall of 2017. Jeff Wilson is a percussionist, multi-instrumentalist, and producer, who has worked with Maza Meze, Jaffa Road, and Ensemble Polaris among many other groups. He also works as a dance accompanist spending many hours improvising under the direction of artists such as Jon Bonham, Serge Bennathan, and Janet Johnston.

Kitchen Clean-Up

“Kitchen Clean Up” is an expression of the tension and the comfort experienced during the COVID-19 Quarantine as families navigate close quarters, parents navigate working from home while homeschooling, and equity-seeking populations struggle for basic needs such as food and safety. The demise of the constructed segregation of work, family, public, and private, has the increased pressure and responsibility to improvise art both cathartic and reflective.

Singapore

Cheryl Ong

Cheryl Ong is co-presented by LASALLE College of the Arts.

Cheryl Ong is a Singaporean percussionist who performs regularly with avant rock group, The Observatory. Though classically trained, Cheryl consistently struggles with the fact that classical music can be divisive and limited to its roles. Tired of being a mere technician, Cheryl has gone on to explore improvisational and experimental practices in recent years, hunting down new ideas and sounds.

Wrench

Cheryl usually plays drums, but the pandemic has confined her to her home with space and noise level constraints. With no drums and a lot of time on her hands, she is pushed to explore new avenues of creation, in hope of releasing some of that pent-up energy and restlessness. Played and recorded using Ableton Live, Wrench is a heavily distorted reflection of this strange and uncertain time—akin to a time loop—where one experiences a span of time which is repeated, skirting between regularity and chaos and longing to break out of that cycle of repetition.

Ontario, Canada

Claudia Rick

How to Make Tea

Claudia Rick can be found on Instagram @fullthrottlerolemodel or within walking distance of their basement apartment in Toronto, Canada.

Interests include: thrifting, friendship, magic, and justice.

UK

Cointeen Trash

Cointeen Trash are co-presented by Elysium Gallery.

Cointeen Trash are Cointeen Male and Cointeen FeMale.

They always wear identical CointeenBlue dresses which carry every satin, trace, and residue from each performance dating back to June 2019.

Part of their day is to :

DisturbBoardersOpenChannels
LiberatingLanguageOpeningUpWordsIntoSounds
ProduceNewAssemblagesAndCollectives
HarnessingAutonomousEnergy
ImpromptuHappenings
ANewAntiRoutine
UnpickingDefinitions
BreakingSocialCodes
UnhingedImprovisedPatterns
UnderTheSurfacePerformance
PouringThruTheGaps
LiberatingLanguage(again)
PhysicalRanting
HarvestingTheAbsurd
ShapingLimitlessPossibilities
ApproachingPerformanceWhichEradicateSItsFraming
DrainingTheSubjectOfAllItsMultiLayeredContent
YeahYoU!
‘LanguageIsTheOnlyMeansOfDeceptionInArT’

Cointeen Quarantine

A framed journey through Newport during the eighth week of Lockdown… or as we prefer to call it, the Blossom Lockdown.

Selected Cointeen ‘Thoughts of the Day’ narrate over the increased prominence of birdsong.

With overtones of past lives and future possibilities caught in the present cracks.

British Columbia, Canada

Dan Gaucher

Dan Gaucher is co-presented by the Coastal Jazz & Blues Society.

Dan Gaucher is an improviser, composer, and performer of creative and improvised music, primarily performing on drum set. Based on the small pacific coastal island of Galiano (near Vancouver, BC) Dan leads various projects including “Daniel Gaucher’s Filthy Rich,” a group dedicated to the intersection of free improvisation and graphic scores, and Star System, a large ensemble dedicated to the music and philosophy of the Great Jazz Composer Sun Ra.

Wood Shed

For this special opportunity to be a part of the IF 2020, I wanted to do something I might not normally do… something only a pandemic could bring on. So, in isolation, I found myself converting my woodshed into a percussion and electronics outpost, and making instruments out of wood scraps from various projects, without a drum in sight. I hope you enjoy this rhythmic meditation on sound and space.

USA

Dana Reason & Paris Myers

Mother and Daughter and the Benvenue Avenue Letters of 1918

Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada

Daniel Oore and Stacy Smith

Riparian Dan

Daniel Oore is a creator, performer, teacher, and scholar. He is an IICSI Postdoctoral Fellow at the Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Ontario, Canada

David Celia

The Traveller’s Ascent into the Underworld

David Celia is co-presented by Mariposa Folk Festival.

David is an innovative singer/songwriter and astonishing guitar player, known for his spontaneously driven live performances. His songs cross many genres and have been described as “White Album Beatlesque.” Influences vary from Alternative Folk, Jazz/Blues, Classical, Rock n’ Roll, 60’s Psychedelic and even Classic Rock as a younger listener. He frequently tours across Canada and Europe, and is quoted as being “one of Toronto’s best guitar players” by CBC Radio. David’s reputation as a guitarist has led him to play with many Canadian artists including Andy Kim (The Archies), legendary Alt-Country/folk singers Ian & Sylvia Tyson, and acts diverse as Icelandic alt/pop star Emiliana Torrini. David’s music consistently appears on the BBC and CBC, and even Gordon Lightfoot has bought his albums. More recently, he has been performing music from his latest album Daydreamers with his duo partner Marla. Career highlights include playing many great festivals, including Hillside and Mariposa in Canada and Glastonbury Festival in England for the fourth time in 2019.

Ontario, Canada

Debashis Sinha

A percussionist with a distinctive voice and imagination, Sinha has long been a fixture on Canada’s creative music scene as an acoustic and electronic musician, exploring the many different ways traditional and contemporary tools can inform each other to make sound and story. He is well known as a composer and sound artist, making many appearances nationally and internationally at ISEA, MUTEK Montreal, MUTEK Japan, the Banff Centre, Madrid Abierto, the Guelph Jazz Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and other venues. He is active in the Toronto theatre community as an award-winning sound designer and composer, creating audio for productions at Soulpepper, the Stratford Festival, Necessary Angel, and many other companies.

Lights on a String

As a percussionist, I think about time a lot. As a father and a mortal being, I think about it too. This extraordinary liminal space we find ourselves in, between inhale and exhale — it’s a terrifying wonder. Time doesn’t mean what it did, time won’t mean the same thing on the other side (whatever that looks like). Waking, sleeping — the cycles of time our bodies are in are free, unshackled by structure and demand. I wake, move downstairs quietly in the middle of the night to play, to touch on the caesura the world is in, to touch on a memory of time, a mindful remembrance of steps, stairs, forward motion, memories filtered through the unreality we humans find ourselves in, right now, in this instant.

Time is points of sound, strung together like lights on a string.

Photo by Andreas Lammers

USA/Singapore

Dirk Stromberg

A New Stillness

Dirk Stromberg is co-presented by LASALLE College of the Arts.

Dirk Johan Stromberg is an American music technologist, composer, and improviser. His body of work explores the dynamic interaction between performer, technology, and performance practice. Designing both hardware and software has led to the development of a variety of interfaces, synthesis techniques, installation works, electro-acoustic instruments, and interdisciplinary production works and most notably his Phallophone, an electro-acoustic sensor-based instrument.

Current projects include a series of presentations and development of his tactile interactive installation “Line Segments” and the collaborative video and movement work “Images of Ascension.” His touring has led to a number of performances in Asia, North America, and Europe including Moers Festival (Moers, Germany), KLEX Festival (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), Map Festival (Melaka, Malaysia), Choppa Festival (Singapore), Open Waters Festival (Halifax, Canada), Duong Dai Festival (HCMC and Hanoi, Vietnam), M1 Fringe Festival (Singapore) and Dear Himalaya From Chiang Mai (Chiang Mai, Thailand).

South Korea

Dong-Won Kim (Wonkwang Digital University)

Percussionist, pedagogue, vocalist, composer, improviser, Dong-Won Kim has studied various forms of traditional music from great Korean music masters. In 1987, he was a political prisoner for assembling illegally for a funeral ceremony for an innocent young victim who was killed by a policeman’s teargas gun shot. By participating in many intercultural projects, he has been devoted to sharing the profound beauty of Korean traditional culture and music with the world. He has performed in Europe, the US, Japan, and many other countries, especially as a member of cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble. Kim teaches music online as a professor of Wonkwang Digital University, Korea. He has also written a fairy tale known as Story of Samulnori (2001), and he was featured in a music documentary film, Intangible Asset Number 82 (2009).

Black, the Most Beautiful

As an improviser, I enjoy playing primitive instruments; drums and voice. Before playing, I always remind myself that “I have no plan for this.” Less planning makes me more responsive to others. In this instance, as I was alone, I was able to be as responsive as possible to my inner voice, my honest intuition. I banged and mumbled. All of sudden, the word “black” came out. Maybe it was right after I listened about the incident of George Floyd. At that moment, I realized how I feel so sad for the loss and downfall of humanity. I cry for Floyd.

USA

Douglas R. Ewart

Douglas R. Ewart, composer, musician, improviser, instrument maker, tailor, inventor, scholar, philosopher, craftsman, visual artist, cultural worker, and Professor Emeritus The School of the art Institute of Chicago.

Meditations for a New Paradigm in Human Relations

Improvisation is intrinsic to human life, our survival, and THRIVAL. It must not be spoken of and dealt with like a thing apart, it rather must be encouraged, fostered, and wholeheartedly embraced if we are to take wings and soar in body, mind, and spirit. Improvisation is key to uncovering, discovery, and invention.

We are perpetually at a crossroads/turning point in positive human relationship, development, and advancement, as humans are complex and often inscrutable, and learn and move at glacial . . . geological speed in making lasting universal improvements, as consensus is an essential element in providing individual expression and input, and ultimately common unity, which is achieved through the crucible of conflagrated, impassioned disputes, which must be buttressed by patience, attentive/deep listening, and mutual respect in order to gain diverse over-standing/understanding, perspectives, and solutions.

—Douglas R. Ewart

British Columbia, Canada

Elisa Thorn

Elisa Thorn is co-presented by the Coastal Jazz & Blues Society.

Elisa Thorn is a harpist, vocalist, and composer living and working in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the Sḵwxw̱ ú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her music is propelled by two artistic objectives: firstly, how to create music that is both abstract and accessible; and secondly, how to lead a band with harp in a way that does not compromise sensitivity with its boldness, or generosity with its curiosity. Interested in the intersection between composed and improvised music, she is involved with many projects including HUE, The Giving Shapes, and Gentle Party. Her values in community have led her towards work as a curator and presenter, and much like her artistic musical inquires as a music creator, her inquisitions as a presenter focuses on how to create accessibility of challenging and/or abstract art through intentional methods of presentation.

This improvisation is based off of my composition “Frame Poem,” which is simply a few phrases that serve as a frame for an improvisation. I originally wrote it for Meredith Bates’s Like The Mind ensemble, which brought together three Swedish and three Canadian Musicians in Stockholm in February this year.

Photo by Sewari Campillo.

Ontario, Canada

Emilyn Stam & John David Williams

Emilyn Stam and John David Williams met as members of Lemon Bucket Orkestra in 2012. They released an album of instrumental duo compositions and improvisations in 2015, and are releasing an album of music for European folk dances called Honeywood this summer. As a duo, they’ve played concerts and dances in France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Czechia, Hungary, and across Canada.

Speed River Improvisation

Our musical journey as a duo started out with improvising clarinet and fiddle duets, enjoying the similarities in timbre and dynamic possibilities of these instruments in melodic conversation. More recently we’ve immersed ourselves in playing folk dance music of France. In this improvisation we go into a bourrée feel, a dance from the region of Auvergne. Since the pandemic has cancelled all our performances, we’ve been thinking of interesting ways of still bringing music to people in person. We’ve been doing regular parades through neighbourhoods playing clarinet and accordion for people on their lawns and porches, and for this improvisation we decided to set up on a public path in Riverside Park. We are accompanied here by the sounds of birds, a bug that flies into the lens, and a well-timed bike bell!

France

Erwan Noblet

Home

Erwan Noblet is a vocal explorer, passionate about the infinite power of the human voice. He is a voice teacher, singer, and free vocal improviser. He performed with different bands and theater companies, and released two EPs, Ride your Horse (2012) and So Alive (2017) under the name Layenn. In 2019, he graduated from Shenandoah University with a Master of Music in contemporary voice pedagogy and where he had taught Circle Singing classes. He recently studied with mentors such as Bobby McFerrin and Rhiannon. Free vocal improvisation has become a meaningful way for him to explore and make music with people from all over the world. In 2020, he will begin studying in Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph.

UK

Evan Parker

I was born in Bristol in 1944. At the age of 9, my family moved to West London near Heathrow Airport where my father worked. I did my A levels at Chiswick Polytechnic and then went to Birmingham University where I was “required to terminate my studies” after two years. The one clear piece of instruction I took to heart was to “prepare for the coming Age of Leisure.” I had been working hard on the saxophone so this advice coincided with my own plans. In the late 60s, I moved back to London, was asked to join the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, went on to co-found the Music Improvisation Company, the Musicians’ Co-operative, Incus Records, and MUSICS magazine. I sat on the Jazz Sub Committee of the Arts Council of Great Britain and later the Music Panel. I made connections with like-minded musicians in Germany, Holland, and the US, where I continue to work. More recently, I started another record company, psi, and have built a catalogue of 85 recordings either as musician or producer. In 1990 I founded my ElectroAcoustic Ensemble to investigate the then new technology of live processing of acoustic instruments. I was awarded a Hamlyn Foundation Award in 2008, an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 2015, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Huddersfield in 2016. I was awarded the Albert Oehlen Instant award in 2019.

British Columbia, Canada

François Houle

Lazio Strut

Clarinetist François Houle has established himself as one of today’s most inventive musicians, in all of the diverse musical spheres he embraces. Inspired by collaborations with the world’s top musical innovators, François has developed a unique improvisational language, virtuosic and rich with sonic embellishment and technical extensions. He has worked with Dave Douglas, Mark Dresser, Joëlle Léandre, Benoît Delbecq, Evan Parker, Samuel Blaser, Gerry Hemingway, Marilyn Crispell, Myra Melford, René Lussier, Alexander Hawkins, John Butcher, Kris Davis, Georg Graewe, Håvard Wiik, Guillermo Gregorio, Eyvind Kang, Hasse Poulsen, and many of Canada and the international scene’s top creative music artists.

His extensive touring has led to solo appearances at major festivals across Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia. A prolific recording artist, he has released over twenty recordings as a leader, earning multiple Juno Award and West Coast Music Award nominations. He is the founder of Afterday Audio, a record label dedicated to the documentation and dissemination of his many musical projects and collaborations. In addition, he has appeared on numerous recordings on the Songlines, Red Toucan, Leo Records, Drip Audio, PSI, Between-the-Lines,Nuscope, Spool, hat[now]ART, Redshift, and CRI labels, among others.

François studied at McGill University, went on to win the National Debut competition, and completed his studies at Yale University. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts and at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy, and was a featured soloist in the International Clarinet Association’s 2007 and 2008 ClarinetFests. He is a faculty member at the Vancouver Community College School of Music, and a former graduate clarinet studio instructor at the University of British Columbia. He served as Artistic Director of the Vancouver Creative Music Institute for five years. In 2008 he was appointed as “Associate Composer” of the Canadian Music Centre.

François Houle is a Backun artist and clinician. He plays Backun clarinets, mouthpieces, bells, and barrels. He is also a Légère Artist, performing on Signature European cut reeds.

Manitoba, Canada

Garry Thomas Morse

Garry Thomas Morse has published several collections of poetry, notably Discovery Passages, about his Kwakwaka’wakw Indigenous ancestors, and Prairie Harbour, both of which were shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award. He is also the author of a speculative fiction series called The Chaos! Quincunx; two of its three books have been nominated for the ReLit Award. His most recent books are the novel, Yams Do Not Exist (Turnstone Press) and the forthcoming poetry title, Scofflaw (Anvil Press, 2021).

Cliffhanger

“Cliffhanger” is a selection from the long poem, Scofflaw, playing with the trope of serialized Westerns and fancy foot-working around Indigenous-Settler politics.

Photo by by KC Adams

Ontario, Canada

Gary Barwin

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, and multidisciplinary artist. His latest books include For It is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems (edited by Alessandro Porco) and his national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates, which won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and was also a finalist for both the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. A new novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy will appear from Random House in 2021. A PhD in music composition, his writing, music, media works, and visuals have been presented and broadcast internationally, including a year-long multimedia installation at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. He is a prolific collaborator having regularly worked with writers, musicians, artists, filmmakers, and dancers. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

ReverBENT BANTER

ReverBENT BANTER is a poetry and music performance reflecting on the idea of reverberation. Because this is a time of isolation, perhaps we are especially sensitive to the communicative echo of relationship and communication. We shout or whisper or breathe into the world and hope for an answer, if only to hear our own voice, our own body. Most of the pieces in ReverBENT BANTER are improvisations using voice, computer (using vocal and typewriter samples) or the Armenian duduk and were creating using reverberation and delay. The processing and the visuals were also created through improvisation.

Singapore

George Chua

George Chua is co-presented by LASALLE College of the Arts.

George Chua is an artist based in Singapore, active since the late nineties. As an instigator and explorer of the otherworldly potential of sound, he has no interest in developing a singular style or genre of music. Apart from his solo work and performances, his collaborative interests include live improvisation with sound, unconventional strategies for soundtracks, and sound design for film and theatre. An upcoming album entitled Smokescreen will be released in 2020 under Ujikaji Records.

The Sacrifice

My contribution to IF2020 is a solo improvisation with Lyra 8 Synth titled The Sacrifice.

Ontario, Canada

Georgia Simms & Adam Bowman

The Improvised Ritual

This 12-minute experiment is framed by a movement technique and accompaniment sequence that was developed in the 1930s by Martha Graham and Louis Horst, and since interpreted by David Earle (www.dtde.ca) among others.

Both Adam (drummer/percussionist) and Georgia (dancer) are intimately familiar with the ritualized sequence, each having participated in more than 10,000 hours of this practice, as led by David in the studios at 42 Quebec Street in Downtown Guelph, Ontario.

The musical improvisation holds true to the time signatures, tempos and energetic intentions of the form, but makes space for different soundscapes (traditionally piano or hand drums only) with the introduction of Adam’s unique design of drumset and digital technology.

The dance breaks away from a seated, technical series of torso-led tasks. Georgia’s challenge is to hear something deeply familiar, find a way to listen through habit, and explore the moment while also honouring an internalized ritual.

It is strange to create this music and movement alone. It is not meant to be a solo experience. It is an art form that asks for togetherness, community, and shared breath. But until that is again safe, befriending the solo and having compassion for what is true, right now, are ways through.

Portugal

Gisela Ferreira

Gisela Ferreira is co-presented by Elysium Gallery.

Gisela Ferreira was born and raised in Águeda, Portugal. Her first contact with art was through music, having studied piano throughout her childhood. In 2008 she was introduced to classical ballet; contemporary dance came later, when she was 18. In 2016, she joined Escola Superior de Dança (ESD) in Lisbon, where she learned more about the richness of contemporary dance and started developing her own style. While in ESD she focused on interpretation, taking part in new creations such as “Ponto Vivo” (Amélia Bentes) and “Porque é Que o Céu é Azul” (Liliana Garcia); she also started choreographing small works, such as “Desfoco” (in cocreation with Jonathan Almeida). She graduated in 2019 and joined Companhia Instável’s Advanced Program in Interpretation and Choreography (FAICC) in 2020, where she further developed her creative research. Currently, Gisela is working on her first long piece as a professional freelance artist, titled self-portrait #12658 (revisiting).

now moving into

now moving into is a short dance film created during and on social distancing. It brings together the monotony of domestic life, a longing for touch, and the feeling of overwhelmingness created by the gigantic amount of media information and news and government directions and advice about the COVID-19 pandemic.

British Columbia, Canada

Gordon Grdina

Gordon Grdina Makes Music that is Important for Humanity.
—Eyal Hareuveni

Gordon Grdina is a JUNO Award-winning oud/guitarist whose career has spanned continents, decades, and constant genre exploration throughout avant-garde jazz, free form improvisation, contemporary indie rock and Arabic. His singular approach to the instruments has earned him recognition from the highest ranks of the jazz/improv world. Grdina has performed and collaborated with a wide array of field-leading artists including Gary Peacock, Paul Motion, Marc Ribot, Mark Helias, Mats Gustafsson, Hank Roberts, Mark Feldman, Eyvind Kang, Colin Stetson, Mat Maneri, Christian Lilinger, Matt Mitchell, & Jim Black.

Ejdeha and Koen Dori

There are two original compositions for this video. The first is “Ejdeha” which means dragon or monster in Persian and Kurdish, and was originally written for my group The Marrow, which explores the connection between Persian, Arabic and contemporary western improv. There is an opening improv, the piece, then improv over the melodic ostinato that forms the basis of the composition. The second piece, “Koen Dori,” is for Classical guitar and is named after the club in Tokyo where I finished writing it. It is influenced by Alban Berg’s “Piano Sonata opus 1.” It will be featured on my solo classical guitar oud album coming out later this year.

Canada/USA

Grace Scheele

Grace Scheele is co-presented by the Open Ears Festival.

American-Canadian Grace Scheele is an award-winning contemporary harpist, composer, theatre artist, and improviser based in Kitchener, Ontario. As a soloist, she reimagines the harp as an electroacoustic instrument: improvising with looping, samples, bowing, effects, preparations, and live electronics. Through her creative work she explores themes of lived experience, gender identity, and nationality.

queens blvd

queens blvd is a triptych improvisation exploring the soundscapes of domestic living. Filmed in three scenes, each improvisation is an interaction between harp, electronics, and the sounds and objects surrounding them.

Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada

Greg Bruce

Etude for Feedback Tenor and Leaklight

Greg Bruce is a woodwind player, composer, and educator from St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. As a veteran of the indie, classical, jazz, and experimental music scenes of his hometown, he can be heard playing with a wide variety of groups and on numerous recordings. In addition to having thoroughly toured Eastern Canada, he has performed in the US and Europe.

His main creative output for the past several years has been composing for and leading the award-winning “world-beat-party-jazz” group, Ouroboros. In 2017, Greg was commissioned by the Newfoundland Symphony Youth Orchestra to write Spear and Sand, which was premiered in April 2018.

As an educator, Greg has been teaching for over 15 years. He works as a private teacher and has taught as a sessional lecturer at Memorial University. Greg has adjudicated festivals and competitions, and has led countless masterclasses and workshops, including his Horn Jam! youth improvisation series.

Greg is splitting his time between Ontario, where he studies at the University of Toronto, and Newfoundland and Labrador. As part of the Doctor of Musical Arts program at U of T, Greg studies analogue electroacoustic saxophone music and is composing for his newly invented saxophone-feedback system.

USA

Hamid Drake

Heart’s Intention

Hamid Drake is a drummer / percussionist from Chicago. Drake worked intensively with Fred Anderson from 1974 until Anderson’s passing in 2010. It was through Anderson that a young Hamid first got to know Douglas R. Ewart, George E. Lewis, and other members of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), with whom he has played extensively. He has studied drums extensively, including eastern and Caribbean styles. He frequently plays without sticks, using his hands to develop subtly commanding undertones. More and more, though he’s engaged as sideman, Hamid devotes his energies and creativity as band leader and co-leader focusing on his own groups and projects such as Bindu, the Indigo Trio (with Nicole Mitchell and Harrison Bankhead), and as a duo with the Italian vibraphone player Pasquale Mirra.

Saskatchewan, Canada

Helen Pridmore

Helen Pridmore enjoys a career focused on contemporary scored music, experimental music, and improvisation. She has performed at Carnegie Hall (with the American Symphony Orchestra), and at many venues in the US and Europe, Mexico, and Japan. In Canada, she has performed from St. John’s, NL (Sound Symposium) to, Victoria BC (Open Space Gallery and Aventa Ensemble). Helen has premiered works by Michael Finnissy, Martin Arnold, and many others – including her own solo voice work Sor Juana and the Silences (2018).

Helen performs with the voice/electronics duo Sbot N Wo, which has toured in Canada and Europe. Sbot N Wo’s CD Songs was released in 2015. Helen also has two CDs on the Canadian Music Centre’s Centrediscs label: Janet, for solo voice, and …between the shore and the ships… with clarinetist Wesley Ferreira, which won the 2013 East Coast Music Award for Best Classical Recording.

A Pandemic Opera

While idly scrolling through some social media and having some snacks whilst in lockdown, a crazy little opera in four scenes appeared to me… as if in a dream? Or a nightmare? Is it a collection of extended vocal techniques? A light-hearted mockery of serious opera? An improvisation on words and phrases we’ve heard many, many times in the last few months? I don’t know, but what you see here is what appeared in that cauchemar de voix. Enjoy, in these unprecedented times!

UK

Izaak Brandt

Izaak Brandt is co-presented by Elysium Gallery.

Izaak Brandt is a multidisciplinary artist based in London and working in the mediums of dance, sculpture, performance, filmmaking, and drawing. Brandt’s practice is based on his experience as a dancer and the energetic relationships between dancers. Having competed and performed around the world with world-renowned Breakdance company Soul Mavericks, Brandt now looks for other mediums in which to explore and decode dance to make it accessible to a wider audience. Stated by Dazed Magazine as one of six British artists pushing street culture forward in 2018, Brandt’s practice explores identity through dance, movement, and the human body.

 The Circle Has Moved

The film was made in response to the lockdown, highlighting 52 dancers from all over the world in isolation but also in unity. The individual frames contextualise the separation from community whilst still maintaining a strong sense shared experience. The film is reinforced by a poem written & performed by me with an original score by my father, Pete Brandt.

USA

Jacob Cohen

Jacob Cohen is co-presented by ArtsEverywhere.

Jacob Cohen is a Brooklyn-based experimental cellist, visual artist, and found-object instrument maker. For the past decade, he has earned a living performing in the New York City subways and freelancing as an improvisational cellist. For four years, he ran a music program at the Rikers Island correctional facility in New York City called Cello Without Walls. His music is featured in the 2014 film Foxcatcher.

Sublime

This improvised piece titled “Sublime” was performed on June 13, 2020 in Jacob’s room in Brooklyn. He was playing a Lewis and Clark carbon fiber cello run through a microphone into two loop pedals, a delay/reverse pedal, a poorly-functioning overdrive pedal, and a phaser. After decades of playing acoustic cello, the effect pedals add a new dimension of sound to explore and play with. This piece was recorded with no plan as to what direction the music should take, but rather with intuition as the only driving force. It is a culmination of different techniques and sounds that were developed during years of improvising in the subway in New York City.

Ontario, Canada

James Harley & the Cool Hearts Band

Cool Hearts Band

• Judit Csobod
• Marcela Echeverri
• Ben Finley
• Brent Rowan
• Carey West
• Reza Yazdanpanah
• James Harley, producer

Consort of the Birds

The premise for this project was to creatively respond to a recording of local birds at dawn. With human activity more muted during this period of COVID-19-enforced isolation, such soundscapes are more prominent. Each participant produced an improvisation while listening to the bird recording. Because of isolation, no one was able to listen to anyone else’s contribution until they were compiled. The shared history of the musicians, however, was present in the background. The unplanned synchronicities of the performances add a poignancy to the music. As an additional layer of creative response, the audio mix brings the different performances in and out of focus. Cool Hearts intends to produce a series of these isolation projects over the coming period of ongoing social caution.

Ontario, Canada

Jane Bunnett

Five-time Juno Award-winner Jane Bunnett has turned her bands and recordings into showcases for the finest musical talent from Canada, the US, and Cuba. She has been nominated for three Grammy Awards, and she has received the Order of Canada, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal, and the Premier’s Award for Excellence. An internationally acclaimed musician, Bunnett is known for her creative integrity, improvisational daring, and courageous artistry. Her exploration of Afro-Cuban melodies expresses the universality of music, and her ability to embrace and showcase the rhythms and culture of Cuba has been ground-breaking. She has toured the world bringing her own special sound to numerous jazz festivals, displaying her versatility as a flutist, saxophone player, and pianist. Two documentaries have been made about Bunnett’s work: Spirits of Havana and Embracing Voices. As an educator, spokesperson, and social activist, Jane remains unafraid to explore uncharted territory in her quest for excellence.

I am presenting three pieces of music which have been inspired by digging deeply and meditating on the natural world. My little piece of natural paradise is on a lake outside of Algonquin Park. I have been lucky enough to have come here my whole life, as my grandfather built the cabin years before l was born. These last few months have allowed me to get closer to the beauty and spiritual depth of the natural world around me. I have decided to play improvisations/ meditations on my connection to the land.

1 … a short improvisation with a butterfly and flowers.

2 … my tribute to a Canadian symbol … the loon.

3 … Openness … The Flow.

Ontario, Canada

Jasper Tey

Quarantine Simulator

 Jasper Tey is co-presented by the Guelph Comedy Festival.

Jasper Tey is a freelance filmmaker and editor who discovered the joy of creating video in 2010. He especially enjoys writing and producing comedy sketches as an outlet for the weird and eccentric sense of imagination he’s had since childhood. Among the various film projects taken on over the years, he has written and produced promotional videos for The Making-Box, published short films and sketches on YouTube, and was recently featured at the Toronto Sketch Comedy Film Festival in 2019.

Quebec, Canada

Jean Derome & Joane Hétu

Nous perçons les oreilles

Two saxophones, two voices; two gargoyles, two satyrs; two forces of nature that agitate, whistle, squeak, scrape, blow, and bite, transforming music into a secular incantation and a banquet of sound.

They practice in secrecy, like healers or mediums. Their music is lively, moving, almost “tactile.” The keywords describing Nous perçons les oreilles are: animal, extra-sensory perception, focus, instinct, intimacy, openness, play, presence, rawness, resonance, risk, sincerity, tearing. This is a rather peculiar duo, down to its very instrumentation. There is a certain symmetry at its core: two alto saxophones improvising together, but the sax players also sing, one relaying the other to a point where, sometimes, there is no way of knowing who plays what. A hall of mirrors, symbiotic work. A duality blending into one, just as two ears sending different and complementary signals to the same brain.

A lot has been said about Nous perçons les oreilles. Some spoke of intimacy, violence, textures, daily life, sensuality, magic. Others have described the duo’s music as unsettling, disturbing, overwhelming, off-kilter, iconoclastic, highly contrasting, heart-wrenching, vibrant. The performers have been called bold, courageous, curious… but for NPLO life goes on, and that’s all.

Ontario, Canada

Jeannette Hicks & Melissa Joakim

Jeannette Hicks is a visual artist, philosopher, and emerging arts writer in Guelph where she plays with materials and thinks about how the arts can contribute to positive social change. As a Research Assistant for IICSI, she facilitates arts-based community making through improvisational arts. Jeannette has exhibited in Nuit Blanche, Landslide, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, and has contributed art writing to artseverywhere.com, and Toronto Guardian. She is currently writing a PhD dissertation in Philosophy entitled Foucault on Art as Practice of Freedom.

Melissa Joakim is a lighting designer, projection designer, and composer in Toronto. She plays music in post-punk band Processor and solo as Saturn City, an improvised ambient electronic project based on the moons of Saturn.

zoomabyme

zoomabyme is an improvised conversation between old friends using music, random household objects, and the weird glitchiness of zoom as a medium. Jeannette and Melissa have been friends for over ten years, since they bonded in Melissa’s dorm room through improvised cassette tape collage and automatic drawing. Since the pandemic began, like many people around the world, they’ve been looking for new ways to connect and reflect on the strangeness of the current moment. zoomabyme is the result.

Ontario, Canada

Jesse Stewart

Solo Improvisations

Jesse Stewart is an improviser, composer, artist, and educator. His music has been documented on over thirty recordings including Stretch Orchestra’s self-titled debut album, which was honoured with the 2012 “Instrumental Album of the Year” Juno award. He has performed and/or recorded with musical luminaries including Hamid Drake, William Parker, Pauline Oliveros, Joe McPhee, Michael Snow, Ernst Reijseger, Dong-Won Kim, David Mott, and many others. He is a professor of music in Carleton University’s School for Studies in Art and Culture and an adjunct professor in the Visual Arts program at the University of Ottawa. In 2014, he was named to the Order of Ottawa and in 2017, he received the Ottawa Arts Council Mid-Career Artist Award.

Italy

Jimmy Weinstein & Lilly Santon

Jimmy Weinstein and Lilly Santon founded Traveling School in 2002 in Padova, Italy, with the mission to teach jazz and improvisation as applied to general education. Many different projects grew out of this initiative. Drawing on their life in music and in association with other musicians, they create workshops at jazz festivals, music schools, and regular schools. Playjazz workshops have become known as a product of Traveling School’s projects in Italy, Spain, Romania, Portugal, and the US.

In 2013 they began collaborating with the University of Padova as part of the yearly celebration of International Jazz Day. Other projects with the University include the 2018 Winter School, Educating to Silence Workshop and the 2019 Spring School “NOISING (R)EVOLUTION.” Traveling School PlayJazz workshops have been permanently integrated into the University’s special education masters degree program since 2014.

SEA/SOUL

SEA/SOUL is a multi media improvisational project for IF 2020. A spontaneously composed piece organically set amongst the artwork of Barbara Weil and the architecture of Daniel Libeskind at Studio Weil, which faces the Mediterranean Sea in Port d’Andratx, Mallorca. Lilly and Jimmy played various percussion instruments, keyboard, and voice inside and outside of Studio Weil. They also recorded the sound of the wind and sea. Filming and recording took plae on June 13, 2020. The material was assembled on June 14, 2020.

Brazil

João França

João França is a photographer and documentarist engaged in a wide range of digital arts projects. Born and raised in Brazil, he started his own company, Belina Filmes, as he graduated in Audiovisual Arts at the University of São Paulo. For the past decade he has prolifically documented, edited, and directed video content for the web and TV channels. With his Eye on Water (2009), he won the São Paulo Environmental Film Festival. In 2013, he made his debut in fiction with the comedy Dog Quente (trans. Hot Dog), a short film nominated at Festival Curta-SE. He was the cinematographer for a season of The World According to Brazilians (2013), a series for TV and Netflix; as well as for Second Half (2017), a feature documentary on soccer awarded at CINEfoot and shortlisted at 11MM (Berlin, 2018). During his stay in Canada, he created a directed the web series Storylines (2016) and connected with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph, where he documented the Musical Improvisation at Land’s End Camp, resulting in the short file Why I am here (2017). Beside films, he also works on fine art photography (@joaofrancafoto).

Ontario, Canada

Joe Sorbara

Canadian drummer and percussionist Joe Sorbara has spent nearly two decades developing a reputation as an imaginative and dedicated performer, composer, improviser, organiser, writer, and educator in and around his home in Toronto, Canada. Joe and his family have recently returned from two years in Vancouver where he received a warm welcome from many of the west coast’s most adventurous musicians.

Sorbara is a highly inventive musician who has played and recorded with the AIMToronto Orchestra, Ken Aldcroft, Jared Burrows, Anthony Braxton, François Houle, Evan Parker, Allen Ravenstine, Clyde Reed, and Friendly Rich as well as with many of his own projects including Never Was, Swamp People, The Imperative, Other Foot First, Reliable Parts, Remnants Trio, My Misshapen Ear, and the Imaginary Percussion Ensemble. He is equally comfortable playing jazz, free improvised music, indie rock, and chamber music; but is most at home when playing them all at the same time.

Sorbara is a long-time student of master drummer Jim Blackley. He holds an Honours Bachelor of Fine Arts in Music from York University in Toronto and a Master’s degree in English from the University of Guelph where his work focussed on critical improvisation studies, literary and cultural theory, and pedagogy. Joe has worked extensively as a workshop facilitator and guest lecturer and taught for twelve years in the Music Department at the University of Guelph.

14+15 June, 2020 

14+15 June, 2020 has been an exercise in procrastination. The ideas that came to me during the weeks leading up to the submission deadline didn’t have much to do with improvisation. So, I waited. The day before the deadline I placed a microphone near my drums, turned over a 5-minute egg timer, and recorded some music based on the 12/8 pulse in my head. Next, I placed some items on the drums, turned the timer over again, and made a second track trying to forget about the first as I played. The next day I mixed the two recordings together, syncing them using the sound of the egg timer coming down on my floor tom case and panning them right and left so that you might hear them in conversation with one another. Then I quickly walked through the rooms in which my family have isolated during this pandemic and took 55 photographs. I copied a few of them and flipped them horizontally to accentuate the casual symmetry of the ordering I’d chosen and placed them one after the other with the audio I’d assembled. Save for playing with the last few transitions in order to have them coincide with the cymbal sounds that end the piece, the alignments and misalignments are happy coincidences like those in the music.

Saskatchewan, Canada

John Campbell & Rebecca Caines

Recognition: An Improvising Interview in the Studio with Visual Artist John Campbell

This video explores the relationship of artistic studio practice to improvisation. The video uses excerpts of interview text, time lapse video of the artist completing a piece of a sculpture in the studio, free improvisation with field recordings taken in the studio, and additional electronic soundscape elements. Artists are John Campbell (visual art, video) and Rebecca Caines (interview, sound art). This experiment is part of the project, “multiPLAY: Digital Community Engagement with Canadian Improvisers,” funded by the Canada Council for the Arts. multiPLAY aims to use digital tools to connect isolated regional Canadian sonic, performance and new media artists, who all use improvisation in their work, with each other and with the public; and to find new digital means to support ongoing ethical artist and community collaborations. multiPLAY is also part of the ongoing work of the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, training participating researchers and students in emerging technologies, digital tools exploration, community engagement, exhibition and research creation.

Image Credit: John Campbell. Facial recognition system.

Hungary / Canada

Judit Csobod

Judit is an enthusiast of music cultures, a supporter of socially and politically involved arts, and a veteran fan of free improvised music and punk. She is a current graduate student in Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph.

20614

20614 is an emotional response to the current state of affairs in the world, in lives and minds insisting on the validity of spontaneous, non-skilled musical expression.

Wales, UK

Justin Teddy Cliffe

My name is Justin Teddy Cliffe. I’m a South Wales-based artist working across multiple disciplines as an individual, a collaborator, and as one half of Tin Shed Theatre Co. Over the past 11 years, I have created my own work as well as having developed and performed work in the UK and internationally with The Bristol Old Vic, National Theatre Wales, Qube Art Gallery, China Plate, Battersea Arts Centre, San Diego Fringe, Alma Alter: Bulgaria, and the Birmingham REP. My training is in Directing and Devising Theatre with applied filmmaking, and through my personal practice I explore philosophy, art, pop-culture, and contemporary clowning. My work is absurdist, subversive, and often comical, responding to urgent themes that question our human experience/contemporary living. I’m interested in creating strange captions of the world and in creating things physically, digitally, and through writing, improvisation, and audience participation. Between the Devil and The Deep Blue Sea is an improvisational short film I made in lockdown, exploring that sometimes subtle irking we must all have that tells us “something” is wrong… we just don’t quite know what it is. In a moment of self-conversation, I wanted to talk freely to myself in an attempt to find out what it might be.

Photo credit: Dafydd Bland

Ontario, Canada

Kathryn Ladano

Dr. Kathryn Ladano has established herself as one of Canada’s foremost bass clarinetists. As a specialist of contemporary music and free improvisation, Ladano is a dynamic soloist and in-demand collaborator. She has performed as a soloist and chamber musician across Canada and abroad and has immersed herself in a wide variety of compositional aesthetics and collaborative endeavours. Kathryn holds a PhD from York University, a Masters degree in bass clarinet performance from the University of Calgary, and an Honours BA in Music from the University of Waterloo. She is the current Artistic Director of NUMUS concerts, the Director of ICE (Improvisation Concerts Ensemble), and instructor of improvisation at Wilfrid Laurier University. Kathryn has released two solo albums, Open (2010) and Masked (2019).

Solo Improvisation for Bass Clarinet

This recording is of a solo improvisation for bass clarinet. There was no specific plan in place before the start of this improvisation and it unfolded as a free flow of musical ideas. Solo improvisation has been a strong and recent focus for Kathryn, with her most recent album, Masked, featuring 10 tracks of this kind, which were influenced by concepts explored in her dissertation research.

Saskatchewan, Canada

Kathryn Ricketts

Kathryn Ricketts is an Associate Professor and Chair of Dance at the University of Regina. For 35 years, Ricketts has been researching/practicing dance and visual arts and has articulated the methodology Embodied Poetic Narrative. Her work is focused on developing ‘voice’ through performance with vulnerable populations using artifacts and personal narratives. She runs The Listening Lab, a visual and performing arts ‘incubator,’ and presents exhibitions and performances in her loft in the John Deere Tractor Building.

COVID – LUGS

I have characters that I inhabit for the purpose of creating kinaesthetic provocations towards emancipatory encounters. My 15-year-old character LUG, donning an old overcoat and felt hat and always “lugging” and old leather suitcase, dances stories of displacement, longing, belonging, and in-betweeness.

In this period of isolation, LUG and I wandered my neighbourhood: the warehouse district of Regina, Saskatchewan. Each week we created a very brief improvisation inspired by a site that resonated with us. The works are in dialogue with fierce winds, new grass and blooms, ever changing graffiti and general grit and rust akin to this area. The themes that arose: islands of isolation, tunnels of despair, fierce need for rest not wanting to be just another statistic, longing for touch.

Quebec & British Columbia, Canada

Kerwin Barrington, Geneviève Dupuis, Kevin McNeilly, & Geoff Mitchell

The Confines

The Confines is a ten-minute collaborative set of asynchronous improvisations, drafts, and contingencies co-created by movement artists Kerwin Barrington and Geneviève Dupuis, sound artist Geoff Mitchell (all from the greater Montreal area), and poet Kevin McNeilly (from Vancouver). Their assembled suite of video, text, music, movement, field recordings, and samples addresses the tensions between the private and the public, between closeness and distance, between the corporeal and the spatial, between risk and circumscription, that have emerged for many of us in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. All of the material in the video was performed, written, recorded, and edited in late May and early June, 2020.

UK

Kieron Da-Silva Beckerton

Kieron Da-Silva Beckerton is co-presented by Elysium Gallery.

Kieron studied Fine Art in Contemporary Media at the University of Wales, Newport; this is where he started experimenting in performance, video and animation. Since leaving in 2007, he has been in a number of group exhibitions around Wales and London. His performances, animations and drawings have been described as depictions of visceral violent actions, human perversion, and bestial behavior, creating a nightmarish and grotesque look into civilization.

<.iNfERNO.>

<.iNfERNO.> is being pulled through a kaleidoscopic neon dripping visceral display of horror, composed as an unsettling yet playful commentary on social behaviour, identity, and the nature of being human. It is a structure built on pent up frustration, internal/external struggles with ideals and conflict towards base animalistic impulses towards, sex, violence, and humour. <.iNfERNO.> utilises 80’s B-movie aesthetics alongside crude practical effects and digital manipulation to create an existential experience drooling with horror and madness.

Iran

Koorosh & Mehrdad Behrad

Fluid Aphasia

Koorosh Behrad was born in 1991 in Ahvaz, Iran. He started learning music from his parents from the time he was a child. He learned setar from his father, and vocals from his mother. Koorosh graduated as a clarinet player from Tehran conservatoire. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in piano from Tehran Azad University and an MA in Ethnomusicology from Tehran Art University. His recent CDs are Shenididar and Loknate Ravan.

Mehrdad Behrad was born in 1988 in Ahvaz, Iran. He holds a BA and an MA in dramatic literature and his PhD in Philosophy of Art. Mehrdad is an author, researcher, and instructor in the areas of literature, cinema, and philosophy. He is also the chief editor of the “Honar- e-zaman” newsletter. Mehrdad is a professional acoustic and electric Guitar player and teacher who has accompanied Koorosh Behrad’s projects for a long time.

Ontario, Canada

Lauren Michelle Levesque with François Poirier

Lauren Michelle Levesque is an assistant professor in the Providence School of Transformative Leadership and Spirituality at Saint Paul University, Ottawa, ON. Her current work explores the intersections between sound/music, imagination and space. Lauren acknowledges the help of her partner and primary “COVID-19 bubble companion,” François Poirier, with putting together the final version of this submission.

Sounds in Small Places

This submission documents the interplay of sound and light experienced through the windows and doors of a small, 500-square foot city apartment. Sounds in Small Places was created through impromptu listening throughout the day, mostly while I was working at home due to the COVID-19 restrictions.

Ontario, Canada

Lawrence Hill

Ontario, Canada

Lee-Palmer-Bennett + O’Connor

Pandemic Assemblage #1

Connor Bennett – alto saxophone
Chris Palmer – electric guitar
David Lee – upright electric bass

Lee-Palmer-Bennett has been together almost five years now, and is comprised of Connor Bennett (saxophones), Chris Palmer (guitar), and David Lee (double bass). Pandemic Assemblage #1 is our first attempt at transforming the problems of social distancing – which for musicians includes the scratchy sound quality, internet hiccups, and synchronization shortfalls of video communication – into compositional elements to be welcomed into our musical practice. We each made individual recordings of our distanced playing session, which Connor mixed into an “authentic” original session.

Rather than showing the feed from our screens, we asked video artist Andrew O’Connor to improvise visual accompaniment. Andrew used a DIY motorized rotating turntable and various LEDs; objects, such as crystals and seashells, are captured live in motion from both a camera and digital microscope and fed into a customized digital feedback system in TouchDesigner; all captured raw in real-time, with no post-production work.

Photo credit: David Lobato

Ontario, Canada

Leslie Kachena McCue

Leslie Kachena McCue is a member of the Mississaugas of Curve Lake First Nation, currently living and working in Ajax. Leslie is an artist who also works freelance for various organizations in performance, arts administration, facilitation, project coordination, and curation. Her work is driven by her past, her passion to educate, and the motivation to empower others.

Leslie was selected as a three-year Fellow for the International Society for the Performing Arts and is grateful to have a Thread Residency with Musagetes Foundation. During Covid, Leslie has been spending time with her partner Lindy and her pup Gamble.

Ontario, Canada

Lewis Melville

Lewis Melville is co-presented by Hillside Festival.

Lewis Melville is a Guelph, Ontario, composer, music producer, sound experimentalist, visual artist, recording artist, and multi-instrumentalist (guitars, banjo, pedal steel, Beta-block, mandolin). He began performing professionally in 1968, and is a veteran of the alternative Canadian music scene. 

Lament for Dog Left Alone 

This improvised solo instrumental piece was performed live in my backyard in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. The instrument is a custom-made Pattison Electric Banjo.

There is a young dog in my neighborhood who is often left alone, locked inside the house, while the members of its human family are out working or attending school. During this time of solitary confinement, Maisy (the puppy) often expresses her loneliness and anxiety with lengthy passages of howling and moaning, a canine opera which can be heard around the block through the open windows of her prison.

June 4^th, 2020 was the kind of day that restores a sense of optimism after a long winter—a beautiful day, sunny and warm with light breezes dancing though the rich green leaves of a late spring. Not a good day to be stuck inside. Lament for Dog Left Alone was played in commiseration with Maisy, the sole person in the audience. While I played, Maisy remained silent.

~

I built the “Cabinet” (pictured) to display an ongoing series of paintings which I began in early March. Loosely based on sixteenth century artist Hans Holbein’s “Dance of Death” woodcuts, these small images in oil have been given the more uplifting theme of “The Dance of Life.” The exhibit is on display now in front of my house for all passers-by to see, and I will be changing the paintings daily into the foreseeable future. The submitted video is a piece of music associated with one of the “dance” images.

British Columbia, Canada

Lorna Crozier

An Officer of the Order of Canada, Lorna Crozier has written seventeen books of poetry, most recently God of Shadows and The House the Spirit Builds. She is the recipient of many national awards including the Governor-General’s Award, three Pat Lowther Awards, the Raymond Souster Award, and two lifetime achievement awards. Her work has been recognized with five honorary doctorates, most recently from McGill and Simon Fraser universities. This fall, Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats), a nonfiction book about her life with the writer Patrick Lane will be published by M&S.

Riff on If

I composed “A Riff on If” while I was speaking it, with no notes or pre-writing. A first try at 100% improvisation for me.

Over the last few years, I’ve been working on a book about my husband’s illness and my fears of losing him. It’s called Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats). It’s also about the forty years we had together, and about poetry and cats. It’s coming out this fall with McClelland & Stewart. This writing gave me the courage to improvise for this initiative, to put myself out there with no decoration or possibility of revision.

Ontario, Canada

Lynette Segal & Isabel Segal-Grossman

Suspended

During the uncertainty of the COVID shutdown, I supported my family, and was in turn supported by them. We inhabited the space between peaceful and fractious, with love in our hearts. I threw myself into gardening, cycling, hiking, finding home by the river, on the country roads, in the dappled light of the forests; suspended, yet witnessing life unfold.

Videography by my daughters Eden Segal-Grossman and Isabel Segal-Grossman.

Performed by myself and Isabel.

Lynette Segal has worked in the field of Dance for over 30 years. Improvisation has been a consistent instigator, guiding her work as a choreographer, performer, and educator.

Indonesia

Mahamboro

Mahamboro is co-presented by LASALLE College of the Arts.

Mahamboro is based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and is a composer, musician, producer, and sound editor. He trained in classical music for seven years and holds a Masters degree from the Indonesian Institute of Art. Mahamboro has pursued a diverse range of styles and instruments (saxophone, clarinet, piano, guitar, synthesizer, and his self-made instrument). He has produced several albums and has produced music for dance productions, performance art, and film. In his artistic work , Mahamboro’s practice is focused on exploring, exporting, and mixing different forms of sound, from “acoustic” to “synthetic” stuff.

Due Pandemic

I normally work from a small home studio, producing, recording, and also exploring the sound itself. The problem is, when there is a pandemic, all the live shows (even for jamming to “refresh” my brain from my studio) is “forbidden,” so to put myself online and hope that someone is gonna listen or even respond to it, it must first be satisfying for myself.

So, during this pandemic, I have organized my studio to be a broadcastable studio. This means that I have had to put in the effort to make both the visual and the sound better. I just used some stuff that I already had, added some colorful lights, and record the sound using an audio interface through my laptop.

Panama

Mar Alzamora

Mar Alzamora is a double bassist, writer, researcher, and cultural manager. She is co-founder and doublebassist of Paisaxe Ensemble since 2008. Mar is a published writer, and her poetic work can be found in many anthologies worldwide. Her artist research is an intersection between improvisation, listening, cities, and memories. Currently, she collaborates with the Latin American Experimental Music Platform (MUSEXPLAT), in which she writes about new experimental recordings. Last year, she launched her first recorded EP, Sounding Poetry. Mar Alzamora is a Deep Listening® Certificate Holder and a Nāda Yoga Instructor.

Cartas a Kerouac

Years ago, I reconnected with the Beat Generation. I found those young writers living on the edge of society and politics intriguing, so I took all the savings I had and visited Naropa, where the Jack Kerouac School is located. There, I understood the importance of Dharma Art, long poems, contemplation, and meditation. During these pandemic times, I have been thinking about Jack a lot. What would he have been doing under these circumstances? Would he be traveling, loving…? Cartas a Kerouac is my way to talk to him, poet to poet, and create a realm made of improvised music and noise which recreates our own path. I can’t help but think about those free-spirited angels during this lockdown.

Ontario, Canada / Colombia

Marcela Echeverri

Marcela Echeverri is a musician and anthropologist currently doing her Master’s degree in Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph. Her current research interests involve the exploration of more-than-human agencies using participant observation and sound recording as methods. Furthermore she is interested in interactive installations with components of collaboration and anonymity.

Bound(less) Yard

“Bound(less) Yard” is a piece of improvisation that seeks to bring the improviser together with the sensorial experiences of musicking in your own backyard. Oscar (the dog), birds, squirrels, cars, and airplanes are participants of this improvised act. Even if borders between the private and the public space are drawn by fenced areas, sounds coming from outside do manage to reach the area and participate with the performer. Playing with contained water is another form of exploring the flexibility and fluidity of boundaries. The interaction with Oscar, the dog, is an imperative when one decides to experience this backyard. If the weather is nice, he will be out there expecting to play.

Quebec, Canada

Marianne Trudel

Marianne Trudel is a pianist, composer, improvisor, and arranger. A generous and engaging artist, a veritable powerhouse in Quebec and Canada’s instrumental music scene, she has presented multiple artistic projects that not only bring her considerable skills to the fore but also her keen sense of creativity. At once energetic and passionate, her music cross-cuts a wide swath of musical interests. Her moving, spellbinding music is not easily labelled, one of its many strengths. At once sophisticated and catchy, authentic and unique.

immersed in music again!

After having not touched my piano since the beginning of the pandemic—

Yes, I can’t believe it, but it’s true! I had been feeling paralyzed and so sad to see all the upcoming concerts gone with the wind. I felt like I was missing a lung: the communion, “live” with musicians and with the audience. And I have also been thinking a lot about the world, the environment, our existence here…

—so this little improv was intended to be a quick test: twenty seconds or so, just to check if the sound and image were okay, but then, after a few seconds in, I felt Music coming to me! I felt her presence again. (In French, music is feminine. J ) It was like breathing again! So, I kept playing a bit more, so happy to be immersed in sounds again. So, I decided to keep it as it is. Thank you for sending me back to my piano! I want to offer this improv to the memory of George Floyd, in the profound hope that this time IS the time that things will change. Because we are changing. We are the change. We are one. The only way possible now is mutual respect and unity, among all human beings sharing this planet that needs much more love.

—Marianne Trudel

Canada/USA

Mark & Mary Laver

Dr. Mark Laver is a saxophonist and Associate Professor of Music at Grinnell College. As a jazz musician and creative improviser, Laver has performed with premier international artists including Lee Konitz, Seamus Blake, Kurt Elling, Eddie Prévost, Hugh Fraser, Dong-Won Kim, NEXUS, William Parker, Nicole Mitchell, Walter Thompson, Anat Cohen, Antonio Sanchez, Ellen Fullman, and Phil Nimmons. As a classical saxophonist, he has been a featured soloist with the Kingston Symphony Orchestra, the Guelph Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Conservatory Orchestra, and the Central Iowa Symphony Orchestra. His lengthy discography includes recordings with celebrated Canadian independent acts The Minotaurs, Muskox, The See Through Trio, Steamboat, and Feuermusik, and with his own group, The Earthtones. Laver is also a widely published author. His book, Jazz Sells: Music, Marketing, and Meaning (Routledge 2015), explores the use of jazz music in advertising, and his co-edited collection of essays, Beyond the Classroom: Improvisation and Music Education (Routledge 2016, with Ajay Heble) offers compelling new perspectives on the revolutionary potential of improvisation pedagogy. His work has been featured or profiled in The Washington Post, Salon, Fortune, Times for Higher Education, TEDx Grinnell, USA Today College, BBC Radio 4, and CNN.com.

Duet

My submission for the Improvisation Festival is a duet with my 3-year-old daughter, Mary. Through the months of the 2020 COVID-19, I recorded Mary singing and playing. I edited excerpts of the recordings together and improvised a duet response to the track. “Duet” is a record of the all of the time I’ve spent with my family in recent months, and a celebration of the love and joy we’ve found in the midst of a time of global crisis.

Ontario, Canada

Martin Helmut Reis

Born in Kassel (Germany), Martin Helmut Reis is a visual artist and independent photojournalist based in Toronto. His artwork has been featured on the CBC, CTV, Global, in Canadian and US & UK Film Festivals. His performance art works were included in the programming for 2008, 2010, 2012 Nuit Blanche Festival in Toronto. His interventionist public performances explore ideas about technology, modernism, and personal forms of communication. Ongoing projects include the public delivery of Telegrams and mailart in the period costume of a French Postman of the 1940s.

Photo by Richelle Forsey

Ontario, Canada

Matt Brubeck & Ben Grossman

Take 2

Over the years, Ben Grossman and I have improvised together in a number of different contexts: from a corporate gathering in a gilded bank lobby to the predawn murmurings of Nuit Blanche. For our contribution to IF, our friend and cinematographer Justine Richardson, found us a space in the Guelph Arboretum where we could hear and see each other while maintaining social distance. As is our custom, we did not plan anything. Justine filmed two improvisations, and this is the more contemplative one. After we finished, it struck me how much I have missed making music with people in a common space during the months of the pandemic shutdown. Online musicking is what is now available to most of us, but it is somewhat like a “virtual hug.” It has the intent, but lacks the touch of embrace.

British Columbia, Canada

Meredith Bates & Chris Gestrin Duo

Meredith Bates and Chris Gestrin are co-presented by the Suoni per il Popolo Festival.

Meredith Bates and Chris Gestrin Duo

Meredith Bates and Chris Gestrin are longstanding members of the West Coast creative music scene based in Vancouver, BC. They have collaborated on many projects together, from making award-winning albums to raising a family. All of their artistic creations have been made with love, ingenuity, and care. For both musicians, improvising is a powerful language. It speaks of resistance, reaction, rebellion, collaboration, love, joy, the past, present, and future. Above all else, it demands deep listening and a great amount of thoughtless thoughtfulness. Normally known as Crowman, an improvised electronic music duo featuring more pedals and synths than the eye can see, this is an acoustic diversion, paring everything back to the very basics: violin and piano. Meredith and Chris are grateful to the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation and Suoni Per il Popolo for including them in this wonderful festival.

Greece

Michalis Moschoutis

Michalis Moschoutis is co-presented by the Onassis Foundation. 

Michalis Moschoutis is a composer, curator and educator based in Athens, Greece. Driven by the desire to observe and explore sound in all its guises, Moschoutis’s work calls for physical and mental engagement with the environment and the sounding objects. From live noise shows to recordings of empty churches, and from eclectic festival programming to music teaching, his output remains informed by the somatic and material nature of music.

Moschoutis has toured Europe and has worked among others with Xavier Charles, Aki Onda, Ingi Garðar Erlendsson, Danae Stefanou, Giannis Kotsonis, Acid Baby Jesus, Thalia Ioannidou, Sofia Labropoulou, Ilan Manouach, and Spyros Polychronopoulos. He has collaborated with the Parisian filmmakers collective Nominoë on a series of expanded cinema performances, and he has composed the score for the award winning film Kismet. Although primarily a guitarist, in 2019 he extensively performed the Halldorophone.

As Tones Fade, Meanings Are Unveiled

The effect of recent lockdowns on our sonic environment has been widely documented over the past few months. It has often been viewed as resulting in a sustainable way of living and a sign of a more balanced ecosystem. At the same time, it has often signified death. To me, it appeared as an opportunity to play my concert classical guitar really softly.

Photo by Maria Kachramanoglou

Norway

Moskus Trio

Saskatchewan, Canada

multiPLAY Project Artists

A House Concert of Free Improvisation (Pandemic Style)

This online jamming experiment was initiated by artist and technologist John Campbell. It seeks for new ways to improvise together across distance, inspired by both the pandemic, and our increasingly isolated lives. The performers use Jamulus for audio, Zoom for video, a 360 degree camera, and a suite of laptops, bringing everyone into one living room to play “together.” The performers are all professional improvising artists: Helen Pridmore (vocals), WL Altman (found sound, electronic music, and performance art); Norm Adams (cello); Gao Yujie (live visuals); Rebecca Caines (digital iPad instruments), John Campbell (digital art, video, found sound). This experiment is part of the project, “multiPLAY: Digital Community Engagement with Canadian Improvisers,” funded by the Canada Council for the Arts. multiPLAY aims to use digital tools to connect isolated regional Canadian sonic, performance and new media artists, who all use improvisation in their work, with each other and with the public; and to find new digital means to support ongoing ethical artist and community collaborations. multiPLAY is also part of the ongoing work of the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, training participating researchers and students in emerging technologies, digital tools exploration, community engagement, exhibition and research creation.

Image Credit: Image by John Campbell. Screenshot of the artists, captured from the original video stream, which can be watched in full interactive 360 degrees at: https://youtu.be/eUZO0hpM_B4

USA

Myra Melford

Improvisation, 7.2.20

The pianist, composer, bandleader, and University of California – Berkeley, professor Myra Melford—whom the New Yorker called “a stalwart of the new-jazz movement”—has spent the last three decades making original music that is equally challenging and engaging. She’s explored an array of formats, among them ruminative solo-piano recitals, deeply interactive combos and ambitious multidisciplinary programs, probing the space shared between dynamic small-group jazz and contemporary chamber music. Since debuting on record as a bandleader in 1990, she’s built a discography of more than 25 albums as a leader or co-leader, and has been awarded numerous DownBeat poll placings, a 2000 Fulbright Scholarship, a 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts for Music and, between 2013–2016, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Artist Award, and the Doris Duke Residency to Build Demand for the Arts. The Other Side of Air, the most recent release by her quintet Snowy Egret, was named one of the best jazz recordings of 2018 by the New York Times and one of NPR Music’s 50 Best Albums of 2018. “This is music with an endless capacity for elasticity and surprise,” NPR wrote, “along with an affirming spirit of coherence.”

Photo credit: Don Dixon

Japan

Natsuki Tamura

Japanese trumpeter and composer Natsuki Tamura is internationally recognized for his unique musical vocabulary blending extended techniques with jazz lyricism. Throughout his career, Tamura has led bands with radically different approaches. For instance, First Meeting, his quartet featuring pianist Satoko Fujii, drummer Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, and electric guitarist Kelly Churko, released Cut the Rope, which Steve Greenlee of the Boston Globe described as “a noisy, free, impatient album, that ranks among Fujii and Tamura’s most accomplished.” In contrast, Tamura has focused on the intersection of European folk music and sound abstraction with Gato Libre since 2003. Originally a quartet that featured Tamura with Fujii on accordion, Kazuhiko Tsumura on guitar, and Norikatsu Koreyasu on bass, after the tragic passing of the group’s original guitarist and bassist Gato Libre morphed into its current configuration, a trio with Tamura, Fujii, and trombonist Yasuko Kaneko. Since 1997, Tamura has recorded six CDs with his ongoing duo with pianist (and wife) Satoko Fujii and won accolades from critics and audiences alike. As an unaccompanied soloist, he’s released three CDs, including Dragon Nat (2014).

“As unconventional as he may be,” notes Marc Chenard in Coda magazine, “Natsuki Tamura is unquestionably one of the most adventurous trumpet players on the scene today.”

Wok

I had started playing solo drums, solo trumpet, and solo piano at jazz clubs before the coronavirus affected us. I don’t have a drum set at home, so I wondered what I could do instead. When I hit a wok and a mixing bowl in the kitchen, they sounded very good. I also played my toys that I bought at a 99 Cent Store. I played a pocket trumpet this time, instead of a regular trumpet, because the room is very small.

Natsuki Tamura
10.14.19

Photo by Bryan Murray

USA

Nicole Mitchell & Calvin Gantt

Israel

Nirit Rechavi

Nirit Rechavi is co-presented by Elysium Gallery.

Nirit Rechavi is a dancer, choreographer, and multidisciplinary artist. She focuses on creating multidisciplinary performances, from site-specific and art-responsive projects, to video-dance productions, theatre, opera, and dance performances. She leads improvisation and movement labs and participates in festivals and residencies all over the world.

Zoom In Between

Conversations of body parts in a “Zoomy” space, created via a self-conversation in the Zoom app. What kind of connections and relationships are established within the body? Who are we becoming in the virtual space—both private and public—that is part of our corona-time? Exploring the disassembly, connection, and re-assembly of body parts; reshaping the frame and the inner connection within our body and our screen-space; and raising questions about the present of our body in this space.

Multi-layered body and space, one within the other. Body-parts talk among themselves, from their own perspective, expression, frame, rhythm and movement. Communication between them also exists in our moving bodies in everyday life. Reconnecting and reframing the body-parts creates new stories and interactions within the body throughout the screen-space, which emerges various perspectives of our perception of ourselves within this (virtual) space

Nova Scotia, Canada

Norman Adams

Situation

Norman Adams is a cellist, organizer, educator and creator and is the Artistic Director of suddenlyLISTEN Music in Halifax, Canada. Norm is a former Principal Cellist of Symphony Nova Scotia (1991–2018), and has performed chamber, new, and improvised music across Canada and throughout the US, the UK, and Europe, including at La Biennale Musica di Venezia in 2018. Norm’s passion is creating, performing and presenting new, improvised and electronic music. For twenty years, Norm has led suddenlyLISTEN, producing over 150 concerts, along with outreach and tours featuring Nova Scotian, Canadian, and international artists. Through his work, he has had opportunities to collaborate, record and tour with many leading artists including Joëlle Léandre, Gerry Hemingway, Eddie Prévost, Lawrence Casserley, Pauline Oliveros, Sam Shalabi, Francois Houle and Marilyn Crispell.

France / Belgium

Oliver Tida Tida & RV

Oliver Tida Tida & RV are co-presented by Elysium Gallery.

The Quarantine Diaries

In March 2020, we found ourselves in l0ck-down al0ne, one in Paris and the other in Brussels, both calling home a country that is not ours, and facing the indefinite suspension of work and social life.

We decided to initiate these quarantine diaries in form of a video dial0gue, to confront and process our emotions and thoughts about the unfolding events.

While reacting to each other from a distance and creating together without ever meeting, we expl0re what “communicating” means.

We face, more than ever, the challenges of being an artist, in a time when art is considered the first dispensable commodity.

And whilst we count how much money is left in our pockets, we l0ok at the world’s economy crumble, and witness how radical-and fast can be the normalization of a new era.

Protecting ourselves from the other, and wondering if soon it will be standard practice to wear isolating suits in daily life, to stop holding hands, hugging, touching each other’s skins.

Interfaced by means of avatars and digital personas, we might end up spending most of our given time staring at screens, giving up our individuality, and participating in determining our collective evolution through technol0gy.

As for these times of isolation, we can only connect with others through radio waves using our phones and computers. We l0ok out the window at a dystopic reality where humanity is quarantined for a virus, flying drones surveil the empty streets and technol0gical devices connect and control-us on a global scale.

Running faster towards 5G, the web 3.0 and its future quantic derivations, and far away from net neutrality, privacy, individual-freedoms. From our couches we confront death tolls and observe the commodification of fear, while shifts in power develop at a fast rate.

We fear how the industrial and technological golems, interfaced through governments, might be realizing to what extent it is convenient to manipulate and control a population locked at home, and recall how easy it is to create fear and to use it. Paving the way for totalitarianism.

Looking live at the unfolding of the bat(terfly) effect.

Increasingly unable to accept mortality, humanity is on a crusade against the natural responses to keep overpopulation in balance, and refuses to confront the urgent theme of birth control.

When you don’t see the elephant in the room, it’s maybe because you are it. We became so numerous that we are changing the composition of the atmosphere and the global climate.

The pressure we’re imposing on all living things is so enormous that in one generation time we wipe out ecosystems formed through millions of years. And what if humanity was the virus of this planet?

Among all living things we certainly mutated in the most peculiar and destructive way. Way too small to understand the complexity of the universe, and way too big to understand the complexity of our own micro biota, we are left in between trying to understand ourselves.

To paraphrase the Persian poet Rumi, we are at the same time a drop in the ocean and the ocean in a drop. At a time of mass reflection about mortality, we dream of a collective upgrade in consciousness.

We fantasize about a future where we learn how to be less productive, how to consume less, how to need less. A future where we understand our responsibilities, recognize the intelligence of nature, and collaborate with it to be the guardians of the planet.

We wonder how severe must be the lesson before we understand.

When the next big geomagnetic storm will manifest, it will be the first in modern technological times. The global society will have lost the ability to function without telecommunications and the internet, and will have lost its primordial-program to accept and integrate the transcendent nature of reality.

Everything that happened already, is bound to happen again.

This artwork will last longer than we will.

—Oliver Tida Tida & RV
Paris/Brussels, March 2020

Ontario, Canada

Olivia Shortt

Olivia Shortt (They/Them: Anishinaabe, Nipissing First Nation) is a Tkarón:to-based multi-disciplinary performing artist. They are a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, noisemaker, improviser, composer, sound designer, curator, and producer.

Many highlights for Olivia include their film debut playing saxophone & acting in Atom Egoyan’s 2019 film Guest of Honour; their Lincoln Center (NYC) debut with the International Contemporary Ensemble; their Australian debut performing with keyboardist Jacob Abela in Melbourne; and recording an album two kilometres underground with their duo Stereoscope in the SnoLAB (a Neutrino Lab in Northern Ontario, Canada).

They were selected as a Metcalf Performing Arts Intern in Producing with Nightswimming and Signal Theatre. They have also been named a 2020 cohort member of Why Not Theatre’s ThisGEN Fellowship and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s Emerging Creators Unit.

Their most recent works include writing their first string quartet ‘the body remembers’ as part of the JACK Quartet’s inaugural 2019-2021 JACK Studio in NYC, composition and sound design for ‘Welcome To My Underworld’ (Director Judith Thompson in collaboration with Soulpepper), as well as composition and sound design for ‘Brain Storm’ presented by Lucid Ludic Productions and Why Not Theatre.

As an activist, they are alumni of the 2018 cohort of the artEquity facilitator training program (New Orleans, LA), as well as the 2019 Toronto Arts Council’s Leaders Lab and was a lead organizer and co-founded the Toronto Creative Music Lab (TCML).

Photo credit: Alejandro Santiago.

New Brunswick, Canada

Pallmer

Pallmer is co-presented by Flourish Festival.

Flourish Festival x Pallmer

Pallmer is a string duo that inhabits the spaces between classical music, indie-folk songwriting, and contemporary improvisation. Based in Fredericton, NB, the duo crafts songs that offer ethereal moments of contentment and introspection. Cellist Emily Kennedy and violist Mark Kleyn had performed with each other for several years before delving into their own writing, using loop pedals and effects to expand the possibilities of their wooden instruments. The pair are frequent collaborators; working with electronic music projects, songwriters, and performing as part of the Elm City String Quartet.

Ontario, Canada

Pama

Pama is an experimental music duo that creates evocative atmospheres through improvisation with analog and digital instruments. Ellen Waterman (flutes/voice) and Michael Waterman (theremin, homemade and hacked instruments, processing) have long histories of sonic exploration whether in the context of Ellen’s contemporary music performance or Michael’s work with improvised audio collage band Mannlicher Carcano. As Pama, they create sonic dazzle vector patterns that scramble time, space and place.

Bowling for Da

In this improvisation we explore the contrast between analog textures made by flute and voice and electronic impulses via theremin and synthesizer. We performed in a corner of Michael’s basement art studio that we lit with a bunch of clamp lamps and coloured lightbulbs. Like everyone, we’re improvising our environments these days along with our art.

British Columbia, Canada

Paul db Watkins (DJ Techné)

Paul db Watkins is a Professor of English at Vancouver Island University (VIU). He is also a research team member with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI). At VIU, he is the Artistic Director of the “Writers on Campus” (Nanaimo) series. He has published widely on multiculturalism, hip-hop, Canadian poetry, jazz, and improvisation. Under his DJ alias, DJ Techné, he has completed a number of DJ projects that explore the spaces between improvisation, poetry, hip-hop, and jazz.

Portals (Another World / Another Language) 

“Portals” was recorded on an MPC Live and mixed in Logic Pro X, and then performed and cued live in a single take on a Roland SP-404SX and an Arturia KeyStep controlling a KORG volca fm. The track opens with a sample from the Man Booker Prize-winning Indian novelist Arundhati Roy speaking about the coronavirus pandemic as a portal: “It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” With systemic injustices more visible than ever, she asks us to use this opportunity to imagine another world, which is echoed in the second part of the performance as Sun Ra envisions music as another language. There is freedom in sound (especially when it is open to different styles) to dream and shape the future, which fits with Sun Ra’s vision of music as a gateway to a better world. If you listen closely, you will also hear vocal samples from Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Charles Mingus. Will we ignore the rupture the pandemic created and return to “normal,” or will we improvise and step through the portal into another world?

Ireland/UK

Paul Stapleton & John Bowers

Paul Stapleton designs and improvises with a variety of metallic sound sculptures and custom-made electronics. He currently works at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) in Belfast, where he teaches and supervises research in musical instrument design, performance, and critical studies in improvisation.

John Bowers works with sound synthesizers, home-brew electronics, self-made software, field recordings and esoteric sensor systems. He helps coordinate the label Onoma Research and works in Culture Lab, Newcastle University, UK.

Tragic Experiment 2 (Paul’s Testimonial)

Under the conditions of pandemic lockdown, we have been experimenting with varied strategies for improvisation and documentation – strategies which do some kind of justice to the madness we are thrown into and do not take for granted the technologies that attempt (often superficially) to heal or mend our disjunctions. Rather, we want to investigate a form of improvisation that is uneasy, materially fractured, and subject to divergent interpretations.

Following previous exchanges, John and Paul reconnected via Jitsi on April 24^th, 2020. Network acoustics and domestic spaces were intertwined through a series of tubes, actuators, actants, and transducers. This video documents Paul’s account of the incident.

For information on the wider project this video is part of, visit: Paul and John’s Tragic Experiments.

Australia

Peggy Lee, Paul Williamson, and Dylan van der Schyff Trio

Lee, Williamson, and van der Schyff are co-presented by the Coastal Jazz & Blues Society.

Improvisors Peggy Lee and Dylan van der Schyff have been contributing to the Vancouver creative music scene for over 25 years. After moving to Melbourne, Australia where Dylan began a teaching position at the University of Melbourne in March 2020, the two have found themselves isolating due to a pandemic. Therefore, they have not yet integrated themselves into the local music scene. But as things have begun to open up a bit, they decided to use this invitation from the Coastal Jazz and Blues Society as an opportunity to have a session with one of Melbourne’s finest, trumpet player Paul Williamson. And thus, this brief set is a document of a first-time meeting/ collaboration.

Ontario, Canada

Ravi Naimpally

Ravi Naimpally comes from a family of music lovers. His father Somashekhar was a concert organizer in Kanpur, India, and after moving to Canada in the 1970s he became one of the founding members of Raga Mala, Canada. Ravi Naimpally started his journey into rhythm with his uncle Pandit Nikhil Ghosh in Mumbai, with whom he was fortunate to learn from for five years. He has also received further training and insight into this drumming tradition from Pandit Anindo Chatterjee, Pandit Sushil Kumar Jain and Pandit Sadanand Naimpalli.

Ravi has accompanied many Hindustani artists such as Laxmi Shanker, Dhruba Ghosh, Buddadev Das Gupta, Aarti Ankalikar, Partha Bose and many more. He holds a Masters degree in Ethnomusicology from York University. Ravi is a recipient of the Grant Desi Achievers Award and many grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. He is on the faculty of music at York University and Humber College.

Peshkaar

Peshkaar is an improvisation on a tala (rhythmic cycle) in which the player begins with a simple theme and then elaborates on it by building the rhythmic density. The player is free to explore many types of phrases and often ends each cycle of the tala with a tihai (rhythmic cadence).

Scotland

Raymond MacDonald

This is not improvised but that is: Lockdown 2020

At time of writing, the COVID-19 lockdown rules in Scotland mean that no one can visit our home. I decided to make a piece with my teenage daughters, with whom I was very lucky to be locked down. No irony here; it has been a joy to unexpectedly spend three months in the continual company of two wonderful young people. However, it has to be said that, since they know only too well the sort of music I play, they were somewhat reluctant to get involved in my free improvisation “malarkey.” However, when I offered cold hard cash, their reluctance waned. They did lay down a few ground rules: no “extreme” improvisation. So, things like animal noises, unexpected screaming, loud spittle sounds, or lying on the floor while playing were off the menu. The full exclusion list is a little longer, but you get the vibe. They also insisted on some political content which I was only too happy to include. We filmed the day after they both took part in antiracist demonstrations. The piece sets up a strawman dichotomy that intends to be playful yet serious and engaging along a number of dimensions. The piece wasn’t rehearsed but we spent some time arranging and lighting our front room to try and get a cosy club vibe. We recorded four versions, and I edited the text slightly each time to keep some surprises in there. The one you’ll see was the third of the four.

Raymond MacDonald

June 13, 2020

Quebec, Canada

Rebecca Foon

Rebecca Foon is a musician, activist, producer, and co-founder of Pathway to Paris. She has performed and recorded in a wide array of contexts, most notably as co-founder of the modern chamber post-rock ensemble Esmerine, as a member of Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra (2001–2008), Set Fire To Flames (2001–2004), a member of Colin Stetson’s Sorrow ensemble (2015–2020), and more recently at the helm of her electro-acoustic songwriting project Saltland. With these entities, Foon has performed around the world and released over a dozen albums on various imprints. Esmerine’s 2013 album Dalmak won the Canadian music industry’s Juno Award for Best Instrumental Album. Following a series of six critically-acclaimed releases by Esmerine and Saltland from 2011–2017, Foon began working on new solo music, with her first album under her own name released in February 2020 with all proceeds going to Pathway to Paris. In 2014, Jesse Paris Smith and Foon founded Pathway to Paris, a non-profit organization dedicated to turning the Paris Agreement into reality. Together they launched the 1000 Cities Initiative for Carbon Freedom in 2017, supporting cities in developing and implementing ambitious climate action plans.

I Only Wish This For You

I Only Wish This For You, is a meditation on being alive in this moment in history, and wishing for a peaceful, just, and thriving world for all, especially for the children of today and tomorrow.

Quebec, Canada

René Lussier

Impro confinée pour Ajay

Guitarist René Lussier (b. Montreal, 1957) is a major figure in Quebec’s new/experimental music scene. He leads a multifaceted career as a composer, improviser, soundtrack maker, singer-songwriter, and record producer.

His credits include over 60 film soundtracks, among them Robert Lepage’s phenomenal Moulin à images (2008-2012), and over 30 records, the most widely known being Le Trésor de la langue, a ground-breaking work on oral history that earned him the 1989 Paul Gilson Award.

Lussier has led free improvisation workshops and ensembles of various sizes in Canada and Europe. He distinguished himself in several bands and pro-jects (among them: Conventum, Les 4 Guitaristes de l’Apocalypso-Bar, Keep the Dog, and The Fred Frith Guitar Quartet), and performed and recorded with a long list of collaborators like Gilles Gobeil, Robert Marcel  Lepage, Jean Derome, Martin Tétreault, Hans Reichel, Eugene Chadbourne, poet Patrice Desbiens, and Québécois fiddler Liette Remon.

He has composed commissioned works for Vancouver’s Now Orchestra and Hard Rubber Orchestra, Société de Musique Contemporaine du Québec, and New York ensemble Bang on a Can, among others.

René Lussier received the Freddy Stone Award for “his artistic integrity, innovative spirit, and contribution to Canadian new music,” and the Canada Council for the Arts’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award “for outstanding artistic achievement and excellence.” His eclectic artistic process is guided by experimentation.

Canada/Iran

Reza Yazdanpanah

Tar Solo Improvisation

Reza Yazdanpanah is an Iranian musician who is an improviser, performer. and composer. Since 2009, he has been a music faculty member at the University of Guilan, where he taught Persian classical repertoire, Radif, and Improvisation on tar and setar (Persian strings). Reza & Moi, Me Myself & I, Tamashay-e- Saba, Eshq Amad, and Goshayesh are his recorded compositions/improvisations based on folkloric, traditional, and classical Persian music.

In 2016, focusing on children’s music education, he established his private music school (Yazdanpanah Music School) in Shiraz with his brothers. His recently published book is called Shur-e-Tar (published by Mashahire Honar) which is a comprehensive guide for both music educators and self-teaching students, and is gear toward the elementary level. “Elementary Instruction of ‘Tar’ with a Glance on Various Approaches toward Radif,” is a peer-reviewed paper about this book that was published by the International Journal of Arts and Commerce in 2014 (vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 133–43.)

Since 2019, he has been enrolled in the Critical Studies in Improvisation Master’s program at the University of Guelph. His research interest is creating musical improvisational games for children as social practices in order to equip them for their future lives.

Ontario, Canada

Richard Burrows

Richard Burrows is co-presented by The Arboretum.

Arboretum Improvisation

Richard Burrows has had a substantial career throughout North America, Europe, Mexico, Australia, and Asia. Having earned two Master’s degrees from the University of Toronto, Richard has honed his craft to create a unique approach in both education and performance. An avid educator, Richard has adjudicated and facilitated masterclasses with a specialization in improvisation. As an active freelance musician within his community and beyond, he has organized and performed in numerous events under the auspices of the Open Ears Festival, where he is the artistic director, with famed bass clarinetist Kathryn Ladano in “Stealth,” with new music projects for InterArtsMatrix, as a principle cast member of ScrapArtsMusic, and as a founding member of TorQ Percussion Quartet. TorQ has commissioned over 100 pieces for percussion quartet, including concertos by Nicole Lizee and Dinuk Wijeratne. Richard endorses Yamaha Canada Music, Innovative Percussion, Dream cymbals and gongs, and Black Swamp Percussion.

Japan

Rie Nakajima

Rie Nakajima is a Japanese artist working with installations and performances that produce sound. Her works are most often composed in direct response to unique architectural spaces using a combination of kinetic devices and found objects. Fusing sculpture and sound, her artistic practice is open to chance and the influence of others, raising important questions about the definition of art. She has exhibited and performed worldwide. Her first major solo exhibition was held at IKON Gallery in Birmingham in 2018. She has also collaborated with Museo Vostell Malpartida (Cáceres), Tate Modern (London), Serralves Museum (Porto), ShugoArts (Tokyo), Hara Museum (Tokyo), The Hepworthwakefield (Wakefield), Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin), and Cafe OTO (London). Her frequent collaborators include David Cunningham, Keiko Yamamoto, Pierre Berthet, Marie Roux, Billy Steiger, David Toop, and Akira Sakata among others. In 2014, she received the Art Foundation Award in the category of Experimental Music.

Six Cans

Six cans stand on the white surface. Stillness. Two moving brushes are introduced in the landscape. They move towards cans. Pushing and hitting. They disturb the landscape of six cans and its peaceful stillness. Rattling, hitting, shaking, falling… and then everything stops.

USA

Rob Mazurek

Rob Mazurek is a multidisciplinary artist/abstractivist, with a focus on electro-acoustic composition, improvisation, performance, painting, sculpture, video, film, and installation, who spent much of his creative life in Chicago, and then Brazil. He directs/co-directs the Exploding Star Orchestra, Chicago Underground, Sao Paulo Underground and many other ensembles. He currently lives and works in Marfa Texas with his wife Britt Mazurek.

Light From Jupiter’s Hands Scans Hidden Heart Frequencies

This piece is an improvisation on life during the 2020 pandemic with Black Lives Matter energy towards a new world and an inclusive and love-driven society.

Photo credit: Luciano Rossetti

USA

Rob Wallace & the Oak Park Oak-estra

The Boomerang

Rob Wallace – voice, text, drums
Jason Syracuse – ukulele, tenor sax, voice
Greg McAllister – congas, voice
Chris Woodward – congas, voice
Eric Nakamoto – bass, voice

Rob Wallace and the Oak Park Oak-estra are a collective of performers created out of the necessity of socially-distanced, al fresco musicking, in the spirt of what George Lipsitz calls “arts-based community making.” The Oak-estra includes a rotating cast of professional musicians, health care workers, teachers, students, and multi-generational creative people. This performance was recorded on June 7, 2020, in Flagstaff, Arizona. The text riffs on an idea from Ralph Ellison as well as some lines by Neil Young, Wallace Stevens, and Bob Thiele/George David Weiss.

Rob Wallace is a teacher, musician, and author. He is a Lecturer in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University, and a Research Associate with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. With Ajay Heble, he is co-editor of People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now! (Duke 2013), in addition to many other publications and recordings.

Quebec, Canada

Robin Servant

Du souffle et de l’espace

Robin Servant est un musicien passionné par les musiques traditionnelles, l’improvisation et la composition. Actif au sein de plusieurs groupes de musique musique traditionnelle (Tord-Vis, La Baratte à beurre, la Marée montante) et de musique improvisée (Brugir, GGRIL), il cherche à tisser des liens entre les traditions populaires et les musiques actuelles. Son travail s’organise autour de deux axes: partage de l’expérience et expérience de l’instant.

Avec Du souffle et de l’espace, il explore l’acoustiue des lieux qu’il visite en les faisant vibrer avec son accordéon et divers traitements électronique.

Robin Servant is a musician with a passion for traditional musics, improvisation and composition. He has worked in many traditional music bands (Tord-Vis, la Baratte à Beurre, la Marée montante) and improvised music bands (Brugir, GGRIL). He tries to make connections between popular traditions and contemporary musics. His work is organised around 2 axes: sharing the experience and experience of the moment.

With Du souffle et de l’espace, he explores the acoustic of the places he visits by making them vibrate with his accordion and electronics.

Australia

Roger Dean

Roger Dean is a composer/improviser, founder of austraLYSIS, and a research professor at the MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University, Australia. See www.australysis.com for further information about my work and that of my ensemble austraLYSIS.

Pitch Multitudes

For multi-tuned piano, by Roger Dean (2020)

I’m developing a series of pieces using the grand piano as an instrument capable of playing any pitch, not just the normal 88 pitches of our conventional 12-tone equal temperament (12-TET). I previously made a family of tuning systems where there are no repeating ratio intervals of frequency as there are in ET, but where some increments of frequency (additive steps) between adjacent members of the system do recur. Here I take this to the logical extreme, performing discrete pitches that can be anywhere in the normal audible range. The piano tones are generated by physical synthesis within the software PianoTeq.

This improvisation is named because of the pitch structure and because of the motivic developments I improvised on a touch-pad. I also subsequently improvised a visualisation of some aspects of the audio of the piece, shown alongside it in the video. After the 5-minute piece, the video briefly demonstrates the Max patch touch interpretation window; and then the performance set-up in progress in another short improvisation.

Ontario, Canada

Samson Wrote

Samson Wrote is an unorthodox folk duo from Guelph, Ontario comprised of experimental singer-songwriter Sam Boer and Anita Cazzola (co-leader of art-folk band The Lifers). Their experimental pieces interweave banjo and acoustic guitar with harmonizing, dynamic vocals, telling stories of small, memorable moments. Samson Wrote released their debut full-length album, Pigeon, in February 2019—a collection of songs about how familial upbringing affects the most intimate moments of life. This project was nominated for a Canadian Folk Music Award in the “Pushing the Boundaries” category and praised by Exclaim! as “prolific and expansive.”

Overconstruction

We’ve been talking a lot with our loved ones, haven’t we? Many words between a very limited assortment of speakers. While digitally mediated conversations leak into every moment of the day, unmediated speech between an ever-expanding cast of humans has dried up.

This piece is both a reflection on the need for the diversity of day-to-day conversations that flourishes naturally if not for a pandemic, and an attempt to recreate that feeling of community by layering two voices to make six. It’s a makeshift choir, repeating itself, constructing a village of voices in conversation.

Australia

Sandy Evans

Sandy Evans is an internationally renowned saxophonist and composer with a passion for improvisation and new music. She has played with and written for some of the most important groups in Australian jazz since the early 1980s and has toured extensively in Australia, Europe, Canada and Asia. Sandy was recently inducted into the Australian Jazz Bell Awards Hall of Fame and has been awarded an Australia Council Fellowship, a Churchill Fellowship, an OAM, ART Music Award for Excellence in Jazz, and three ARIA Awards.

Sandy leads the Sandy Evans Trio and Sextet, and co-led Clarion Fracture Zone and GEST8. She is a member of Mara!, The catholics, the Australian Art Orchestra Ten Part Invention, austraLYSIS, Friends of Kim Sanders, Ben Walsh’s Orkestra of the Underground and SNAP. Sandy is an experienced teacher and inaugurated a Jazz Improvisation Course for Young Women run annually by Sydney Improvised Music Association. She is Lecturer in Music at the University of New South Wales.

Black Lives Matter To Me

Australia has done relatively well at managing the Covid19 pandemic so far. Sadly, the same can’t be said for the treatment of our First Nations peoples. There are deeply disturbing parallels between the treatment of Indigenous Australians in custody and police brutality against Black Americans. Recent Black Lives Matter protests in Australia have highlighted this sad connection. Black Lives Matter To Me is a humble offering to add my voice to the protest against racism. This is my first attempt at making a music video. I recorded and edited the sound and video myself in my living room on my laptop during lockdown, while learning the technology. Please forgive the glitches and inadequacies. I hope that in spite of this, the message will be clear. Thanks to Tony Gorman for his drawing Lethal Force For Peace and additional calligraphy. Thanks to Ajay Heble and the team at IICSI and IF 2020.

British Columbia, Canada

Sara Ramshaw & Kristen Lewis

Sara Ramshaw is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia, researching and writing in the area of improvisatory arts-based practices and justice. She feels very blessed to have had the opportunity to meet, work, and perform with Kristen Lewis over the past three years while Kristen attended law school at UVic.

Kristen Lewis is a dancer, performance artist, and writer with a serious, abiding interest in finding creative solutions to pressing issues of law and justice. To that end, she received her JD from the University of Victoria Faculty of Law in the spring of 2020. She will continue graduate studies in law in September, with a focus on the role of performance and storytelling in legal reasoning.

Playing with Ornette: The Trauma and Justice of Improvisation

Engaging with a text written by Jacques Derrida and performed onstage alongside free jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman at the La Villette jazz festival in Paris on July 1, 1997—and later published in English as Play: The First Name—this performance uses spoken word and dance improvisation to explore the justice and trauma of improvisation. On the one hand, improvisation self-consciously engages with tradition and convention, enabling resistance to past oppression and injustice. Justice as improvisation, thereby, opens up possibilities for new ways of being together in society, both locally and at the global level. However, as evidenced by the pain Derrida experienced being booed off the stage at La Villette, improvisation is always traumatic: any first appearance of the “not yet recognised” unsettles and destabilises our current knowledge and understanding of the world. Nothing can prepare us for the arrival of the wholly new. Here, we attempt to unpack the dual nature of improvisation through embodied practice. Kristen Lewis’s improvised dance performance was filmed whilst physically-distancing at the University of Victoria First Peoples House Pond in early June, 2020.

Quebec, Canada

Sarah Rossy

Vigil

Sarah Rossy is a mythical sonic creature of sorts, with a voice that is colourfully chameleonic yet vulnerably human. Bouncing between her hometown of Montreal, New York City, and Berlin, she combines influences of jazz, experimental music, and interdisciplinary movement practices into her work for a truly unique result. As a composer, she has a keen interest in experiential processes which traverse through a feminist lens and nurture the ecosystems of artistic community. Recent excursions include: studying with Meredith Monk, pursuing voice/movement research at The World is Sound (Berlin), composing for the Montreal Contemporary Music Lab, exploring her ethnic heritage at the Arabic Music Retreat, and attending multiple residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts. She holds both a B.Mus and M.Mus from McGill University, where she was mentored by composers John Hollenbeck and Christine Jensen. In 2019, she released a debut EP, The Conclusion (Florafone Records), and is anticipating the release of a full-length album in 2021.

Japan

Satoko Fujii

Kagerou

Critics and fans alike hail pianist and composer Satoko Fujii as one of the most original voices in jazz today. In concert and on nearly 100 albums as a leader or co-leader, the globe-trotting Japanese native synthesizes jazz, contemporary classical, avant-rock, and Japanese folk music into an innovative music instantly recognizable as hers alone.

Since she burst onto the scene in 1996, Fujii has led some of the most consistently creative ensembles in modern improvised music. In 2013, she debuted the Satoko Fujii New Trio featuring bassist Todd Nicholson and drummer Takashi Itani, the first piano trio she has led since her trio with Mark Dresser and Jim Black last played together in 2009. The trio expanded into a quartet called Tobira with the addition of her husband, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, in 2014.

Fujii has established herself as one of the world’s leading composers for large jazz ensembles, prompting Cadence magazine to call her “the Ellington of free jazz.” Since 1996, she has released a steady stream of acclaimed albums for jazz orchestras, and in 2006 she simultaneously released four big band albums: one from her New York ensemble, and one each by three different Japanese bands.

“Whether performing with her orchestra, combo, or playing solo piano, Satoko Fujii points the listener towards the future of music itself,” writes Junichi Konuma in Asahi Graph. Fujii’s ultimate goal: “I would love to make music that no one has heard before.”

Canada/United Kingdom

Sean Corcoran

Sean Corcoran is an improvising artist (guitar, trombone) and educator from Kingston, Ontario. Space, and the relationships between community and self, guide his musical explorations. Sean’s work in creative music has led him to roles with the Music Gallery (Toronto), the Canadian League of Composers, and the Banff Centre’s International Workshop for Jazz and Creative Music. He is currently completing a PhD at Queen’s Faculty of Education, under the supervision of Dr. Ben Bolden, examining the role of creative music making in primary-junior community music contexts.

Visitation

This pandemic has barred me from visiting my family, who live in Liverpool, UK. I was looking forward to walking in parks, making meals and learning about favourite spaces in the neighbourhood—sharing the joy of daily life.

Using field recordings, I invited my family (Jackie Corcoran, Heather Corcoran, Andrew Hunt) to contribute videos from their isolated location: a tree outside a bedroom window; another, shot along a river shore; and the third, a scene featuring backyard chickens. We took the recordings, and interpreted an improvised musical mediation of one another’s space, interacting with the recorded medium. These performances were combined, creating a virtual impression of visitation: me, visiting them. Them, visiting me.

With Jackie Corcoran, Heather Corcoran, and Andrew Hunt.

USA / Germany

Sean Smuda

Sean Smuda is co-presented by Elysium Gallery.

Sean Smuda is an artist, photographer, and writer, living and working in Berlin. He employs a variety of mediums including photography, video, and performance rooted in Contact Improvisation. His projects and collaborations have taken place in Antarctica, China, Iraq, Tibet, and Wall Street. His work is in the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center.

The Berlin Coronnale

The Berlin Coronnale is a daily map of the psycho-spatial effects of COVID isolation, where one can go in public, and what possible directions this new world holds. For the first 40 days of lockdown a daily performance video was made that included improvised songs, movement, and images of the city in lockdown. As things have opened back up, these are more layered and occur roughly weekly. Currently footage sent by friends from Minneapolis (my hometown), is included, an alchemy of brutal and hopeful implications.

Mexico

Sentire

Here / Here, Inside VS Outside

Sentire is a collective that incorporates the expertise of deaf theater actors of Seña y Verbo Company and musicians of the Liminar ensemble with a long history in experimental music and improvisation.

Sentire began in 2018, thanks to 17, Institute of Critical Studies, in order to explore the intersection between music and deafness as ways to enrich our understanding of the field of listening. Sentire develops scenic and performance projects to reflect on the physical, perceptual, and cultural limitations that block listening capabilities.

After two years of work, the artists of Sentire have developed a singular language to create music that combines elements of improvisation and sign language. Furthermore, they have experimented with the construction of instruments to approach the world of sound afresh.

Canada/Iran

Shaghayegh Yassemi

Shaghayegh Yassemi is a film director and a performance artist. She earned a BA and an MA in Theater from Soore University of Tehran. In 2015 she moved to Montreal and finished her second MA, this time in Film Production, at Concordia University. Since the, she has been going back and forth between the two countries to make her artworks. She will start her PhD in fall 2020 in Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph. She is particularly fond of architecture, the surrounding environment, and the way it communicates with people. For now, she is researching how a performance art piece or a piece with performative characteristics can create an experience of poetry.

Hands, Poetry, and Gloves

“Hands, Poetry and Gloves” (with Farhad Mir Mohammad sadeghi and Anahita Izadi Parsa) is a work about how poetry can affect the 30 seconds of being in a public elevator. Somehow, poetry changes the architecture of the elevator for people who choose to pick a poem. I wanted to see how their hands react to these bookmarks with poems on them. At first, I thought I needed performers to invite people to pick the bookmarks, but considering the pandemic, I decided to write an inviting note and wait for people’s responses to it…

Ontario, Canada

SlowPitchSound

Quebec, Canada

Sound of the Mountain

Sound of the Mountain are co-presented by the Suoni per il Popolo Festival.

Sound of the Mountain is a Montreal-based duo featuring the hollowed-out sounds of Elizabeth Millar (amplified clarinet) and Craig Pedersen (amplified trumpet).

Since forming in 2015, Sound of the Mountain have played over 170 concerts together, developing a sound language which merges acoustic and electronic textures through close-amplification. With this language, they create long-form improvised soundscapes, evoking a vast range of textures, from silence and spaciousness, to rumbling bass and saturation.

They have played internationally in Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Mexico and Australia, and coast-to-coast throughout Canada. Recent highlights include festival performances at Umbral (Mexico, 2019), send + receive (Winnipeg, 2019), Sounds Like (Saskatoon, 2019), Avant X (Toronto, 2019), Open Waters (Halifax, 2019), Open Ears (Kitchener, 2018), Make It Up Club (Melbourne Australia, 2018), Codes d’Access (Montreal, 2018), Suoni per il Popolo (Montreal, 2017), and KLEX (Malaysia, 2017).

This recording was made in D’Argenson Park in Pointe-Saint-Charles on June 12, 2020, as part of a battery-powered low-profile outdoor sound art series called Piles Picnics curated by collectif épineux. Sound of the Mountain would like to thank Anne-F Jacques, Alex Eastley, the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, and Suoni Per Il Popolo.

Ontario, Canada

standpartners

A mix of chambercore, dream jazz, semi-traditional, and post-contemporary, standpartners weaves stringy currents of melodies that tear at the seams. Drawing from their Filipinx and Iranian roots, Charity Cruz (violin/vocals/electronics) and Isaiah Farahbakhsh (cello/vocals/electronics) navigate the contrast of self-expression and cultural assimilation through a quasi-composed landscape of sound, noise, and space.

Tigmamanukan

Tigmamanukan is a piece that honours the ancient pre-colonial animist practices and rituals of Filipinx healers and mystics. Named after the bird in a Tagalog creation myth, the tigmamanukan was sent by Bathala (God) to crack a bamboo tree open from which the first humans emerged. The creation of life and the connection between spirits and humans are celebrated as spoken samples of babaylan and albularyo (healers) intermingle with those of tropical bird calls. Tigmamanukan shares the stories of the deep-rooted systems of belief and co-existence between the spirits and the Filipinx people, and how they have chosen to respect and preserve the connection between them.

Photo credit: Scope Overseer Photogenics (@so.photogenics)

Canada/Wales, UK

Stephen Donnelly

Steve is a live artist from Swansea, Wales. His work explores and combines his interests in the intersections of improvised play, belief, contemporary and historical uses of social space, popular culture and the commons. Steve’s work has been showcased throughout the UK and he is currently a graduate student in the Critical Studies in Improvisation program at the University of Guelph, and GRA with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. Cycle1 (provocation) Small section of a longer, live, improvised edit—samples of field recordings, news reports, and half-remembered songs from the old country—whilst venturing outside in 2020.

UK

Svetlana Ochkovskaya

Svetlana Ochkovskaya is co-presented by Elysium Gallery.

Svetlana Ochkovskaya is currently studying her Masters of Fine Art at Goldsmiths University of London, having graduated with a BA in Fine Art from the Southampton Solent University in 2017. She was shortlisted for the 2019 Harvest Short Film Competition,  the 2017 and 2019 Batsford Prize Award, and for the 2018 Visual Art Open Prize. She was a finalist of the 2018 Journeys Festival International Competition. Her film, LookUp: Searching for Home has been shown at Aspex Gallery, The Big Screen, No.6 Cinema, Southsea Library, and Fratton Park in Portsmouth. Aspex Gallery shortlisted her for the 2017 Platform Graduate Award and the 20018-19 Best Visual Artist Guide Award (Portsmouth).

Adapting To The New Reality Of Life Under Lockdown

Social interconnectedness offers human beings a sense of identity and a way to deal with our everyday emotions. The lockdown is a time of great anxiety and uncertainty. We feel the world has changed. Many people are stuck inside their homes and not able to visit other places. Everyday routines are boring, and it seems pointless to do even ordinary tasks at home. In Adapting To The New Reality Of Life Under Lockdown I want to make familiar things unfamiliar, to remove everyday life experiences from familiar associations, to turn them over and to displace them. I would like to give an everyday domestic experience a new meaning, to change the way we perceive the things around us.

Greece

Thalia Ioannidou

Thalia Ioannidu is co-presented by the Onassis Foundation.

Pinna Bounce is the solo project of Thalia Ioannidou (a.k.a s.t.m.c.), musician, sound artist, and architect based in Athens, Greece. Since 2001, she has been composing, improvising, and performing music and sound design for theatre, film, dance, multimedia installations, and concerts. She uses trumpet, vintage keyboards, objects, recordings, effects, and amplifiers. She is a founding member of Drog_A_Tek and miniMaximum Improvision audiovisual ensembles. She has collaborated, among others, with musicians Stephan Schneider, Unni Løvlid, and Acte Vide; in theatre with A. Brouskou, L. Langarde, and Blitz Theatre Group; and in cinema with Margot Sharp, Syllas Tzoumerkas, and Yorgos Zois. Since 2011, she has collaborated with the Goethe Institute – Aten, Documenta 14, Onassis Cultural Centre, NEON Organisation, Hellenic Festival, and Ultima Oslo contemporary music festival, as an artist, workshop conductor, or concert curator.

Pinna Bounce_Feedback Tango

Pinna Bounce project serves as a vehicle for investigating the creation of spaces and narratives through music and sound, using trumpet and amplifier. Feedback Tango is a summer slump improvisation on feedbacks and trumpet. It was recorded at 36 degrees Celsius, on Thursday June 11th in the afternoon, at a small studio in downtown Athens, with no specific intention other than enjoying the bliss of sound.

Quebec, Canada

Thanya Iyer

Thanya Iyeris an enigmatic songwriter who crafts sparkling experimental pop music. Her live trio wields acoustic and electronic instruments to flesh out these serene, spiritual compositions. Thanya and the band’s arrangements are constantly changing through reflections and improvisation, empowering listeners to embrace mindfulness, aesthetic beauty and the interconnectedness of all things. They have recently released their visual album, Kind a journey on self-love, and will later release the full-length album in the summer of 2020.

Kind

The video piece for IF 2020 is a collage of song excerpts and film footage from KIND, woven together with improvisation by Thanya Iyer & Alexander Kasirer-Smibert.

Quebec, Canada

The 312 Ensemble

Droning Bowls for Covid days

The 312 Ensemble is Peter Burton, Lawrence Joseph, Bryan Highbloom, Eric Lewis

Since March 24^th, we have been performing daily via Zoom. Our days, otherwise characterized by relative isolation, have come to revolve around these daily meetings. We always begin by chatting, and a central topic every day is COVID, the latest situation in Montreal and beyond. Bryan worked for decades at the Montreal Jewish Hospital as a music therapist, while Lawrence is a retired professor of Epidemiology at McGill, with vast experience in modeling in health care contexts. Peter Burton, as the artistic director of the Suoni per il Popolo is intimately involved in issues surround public heath and arts policy related to COVID, while Eric, as the director of the Laboratory of Urban Culture (LUC) at McGill, has ongoing concerns related to community health and arts programming. These daily discussions, often over a hour in length, would precede, and inevitably inform, our collective improvisations that would follow. Each improvisation would be given a title prior to its beginning, and these titles would be related to our discussion of the day, often to current news stories, or homages to musicians who had passed that day due to COVID. In effect, our daily improvisations, in the words of Bryan, were our “plague diary.”

For this festival, we wanted to somehow reflect in our music our relationship to the horrific COVID-caused conditions in Montreal, and we spoke at length about ways in which we might do so, which led to a series of interesting discussions on data sonification and music. And so we proceeded as follows—we began by each recording a drone track, Lawrence, Bryan and Eric by playing Tibetan bowls, and Peter by bowing assorted objects. These tracks were then traded between us, and subjected to varying degrees of digital manipulation. The bowl recording by Bryan was very lightly processed, mainly with respect to panning and levels only. Eric’s and Lawrence’s recordings were subjected to more processing, including some application of delay, distortion, pitch shifting, layering, eq, filtering, and amp modeling. Peter’s bowed object tracks were manipulated the most, both cut-up and transposed in octave-range, and subject to multiple effects. Our goal was to keep the acoustic qualities of both the bowls and bowed objects, while foregrounding certain aspects of their overtone series. Moving between sections of unadorned bowl recordings and highly processed sections, the piece reveals the “sounds within the sound” that is characteristic of the complex overtones and harmonics that Tibetan bowls enjoy. One thing we wanted to make clear is the affinities between electronic drone compositions and acoustic bowls and bowed objects, by transforming the latter into the former. This drone backing track has elements of the timelessness that life in COVID is characterized by, punctuated with moments of tension and gloom, equally a characteristic of present day life, for COVID, and other reasons related to the abysmal state of the world.

We then thought about ways of manipulating this drone piece via the application of algorithms using daily COVID data. While we developed a number of methods for doing this, we decided in the end that these modifications to the drone track would not really be musically or informationally interesting. But more importantly, we came to realize that our relationship to COVID as performed in our daily improvisations was too important, and too personal, to not be reflected in our final composition. And so we turned to our plague diary, our growing archive of daily COVID-inspired improvisations, and thought about ways of using daily COVID data to both choose selections from these recordings, and to determine where in the drone piece they were to appear, and their duration. And so the final composition contains ten excerpts from ten of our daily improvisations.

Data were used until the creation of this work, from March 26 through to June 2. For each of these 69 days, we collected Quebec data on daily new cases, daily deaths, and the number of tests run daily.

We divided the 69 days into 10 periods of 7 days each (the last period was 6 days), and randomly selected one day from each of the 10 periods. Since we had improvised together every day, we selected a piece played on each selected day to superimpose on the drone track. For the works from each of these days, we used the number of cases relative to the total range of the number of cases to indicate the starting time of the excerpt from our improvised piece. The closer the number of cases were on a given day to the minimum observed number of cases over the given period would give an earlier start time, and larger numbers would give a later starting time. We similarly used the number of deaths relative to the range of deaths over the time period to indicate the placement of the start of the excerpt, and the data for number of tests given was used to indicate the length of the excerpt. Our final work was then created by superimposing each selected excerpt from our daily improvisations onto the already completed 10-minute drone piece. In this way we feel that the COVID data, itself cold, and far too often heartless, is filtered through our expressive improvised responses to it, while still playing a functional role in establishing the final structure of the piece.

Germany

The Interlinking Collective

The Interlinking Collective is co-presented by Elysium Gallery.

INTERLINKING

While Coronavirus disease still holds the world’s breath, physical collaboration between dancers and artists seemed to be on hold. Inspired through the lockdown situation in so many countries, international dancers got connected online. The dancers were asked to interpret the morse code of their cities. Morse code is the oldest way of communicating across long distances and is reflected here as the artistic idea of connecting cities online via sound.

ARTISTS: Josefina Umfeld, Virpi Juntti, Petya Stoykova, Alexandra Soshnikova, Wesley Ruzibiza, Jae Woo, Ilze Zirina, Lina Gómez, Canan Yücel Pekiçten, V Soumyasri Pawar, Elia Mrak, Raya Chakarova
Sound: Abel & Carlo Korinsky
Concept: Korinsky & Stoykova
Editing: M. Eren Bozbas

Ontario, Canada

The Making-Box

The Making-Box, Guelph and Kitchener-Waterloo’s hub for improv training and live comedy presents The Making-Box Brigade! Made up of fiercely funny friends, this troupe has a solid foundation in comedy and friendship. The Brigade prides itself on a performance style that’s a blend of emotional, grounded work and ridiculous chaos.

Australia/Singapore/Germany

The Mirror Unit

Georg Wissel – Germany, alto Saxophone and preparations
Tim O’Dwyer – Singapore / Australia, alto Saxophone and preparations.

“Tim O’Dwyer and Georg Wissel create a singular work, a demanding music, voluptuous, radical, inspired.”
—Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg

The Mirror Unit represents the synergy and intricate level of communication that can only happen when two improvisers at the top of their game meet in concert. Technically, the two alto saxophone players cover the whole gamut of conventional and extended sounds to be created on the instruments and cover a wide spectrum of approaches and styles in addition to a rich and subtle pallet of textures derived from their use of preparations. This is especially so in the case of Georg Wissel’s armoury of objects that have been meticulously researched over time to extend the sonic capacity of the alto saxophone. In turn, Wissel’s subtle colouring is met head-on by Tim O’Dwyer’s punchy articulated phrasing.” TMU has been performing together since 2014 across Germany, South East Asia and Australia. They released their debut CD, Wind Makes Weather, on Creative Sources in 2014 and are looking to release their second studio recording in late 2020.

2 Vignettes

Ordinarily, we rely on quite an intimate performance space, as we have a very similar tone and gestural pallet including exactly the same instruments. We thought to experiment with this form of working online in a telematic situation as a way of seeing whether we could work this way? How would the music be? In fact, we found the experience to be not as disorientating as we had initially thought. In many ways, it felt like a multi-track recording where we were only put in adjacent rooms rather than being on completely different continents. We ran a Zoom session, with one extra camera each. We used these extra cameras as the footage and Georg recorded the audio into his Cubase software. Afterwards, Tim mixed the audio and video together.

Ontario, Canada

The Parahumans

1. 21 Chopin Nocturnes (Dance production including all 21 Nocturnes totaling 2 hours)
2. New Jazz Dance Improvisations (9 dancers in solos/trios/groups to jazz music classics)
3. Boy Dancer – Fans Choice Award dance documentary, New York Long Island Film Festival
4. Wake Up: The 77 Minute Dance Improv
5. Plato Was A Raver (20 section production with dancers/actors)
6. Gestural Choreography for clients with McMaster University’s Parkinson’s Project
7. Angels & Humans (10 min.) – a commission for Clay & Paper’s family show in Dufferin Grove Park
8. TragiCom Dance Theatre – 3 dance theatre pieces, text & choreography by Dave Wilson

Pictured: Falciony Patino and Yui Ugai. Photo by Franck Butaye.

Netherlands, UK, Ontario & Newfoundland Canada

The Transnational Vocal Exploration Choir

 The Transnational Vocal Exploration Choir Goes Feral with Phil Minton

On June 11, 2020, amidst the global pandemic, the celebrated vocal improviser Phil Minton led his first online version of the improvisational Feral Choir Workshops he has been leading since the 1980s. Participants were members of the three Vocal Exploration choirs founded by IICSI Research Associate Chris Tonelli (The Guelph Vocal Exploration Choir, The St John’s Vocal Exploration Choir, and The Groningen Vocal Exploration Choir). The conditions of the pandemic and the proliferation of telematic technology that followed sparked a desire to improvise transnationally and to unite these three choirs for the first time, bringing together improvisers in four countries. This online improvisation choir intends to keep meeting regularly and welcomes participation from anyone anywhere using any sound palette they wish to employ. For information, or to participate, contact Chris Tonelli (c.j.tonelli@rug.nl).

For this first gathering, the Transnational Feral Vocal Exploration choir was: Phil Minton, Chris Tonelli, {AN}EeL, Michael Waterman, Kati Szego, Dewi Brouwer, Annegreet Bos, Stefany Iova, Bernd Ihno Elits, Peter Gödde, Terri Thomson, Sean White, Taeke Overdijk, Christine Bakain, Ferdinand Lewis, and Iulia Aionesi.

For more information on Phil Minton and his Feral Choir Workshops, see www.philminton.co.uk.

USA

They, Who Sound

They, Who Sound is Houston’s weekly series of experimental music presented by Nameless Sound and Lawndale Art Centre. Based in Houston Texas, Nameless Sound hosts listening experiences featuring international, national, and local voices in experimental music, improvised music, and sound art. In addition, Nameless Sound works year-round with Houston youth in a music program that employs collaborative improvisation as a forum for knowledge transfer, healing, creative work, and play. 

Special Delivery Parts 1 and 2

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Nameless Sound has launched They, Who Sound Special Delivery. For a small fee, anyone can order a They, Who Sound musician to come to their home and perform a 10-minute piece of experimental music, from a safe distance. Special Delivery Part 1 and Special Delivery Part 2 are two videos assembled from audience footage of these performances, and featuring various They, Who Sound artists.

UK

Tracy Harris

Tracy Harris is a writer, performance artist, and filmmaker. Her plays include Past Away (Sgript Cymru), The Cloak Room (Sherman Cymru/ Mighty Theatre, Washington), No Vacancies (Sherman Cymru)—which has been commissioned by spinning head films as a feature film—and Ripples (NTW, RWCMD, Sherman Theatre). Along with Chris Rushton, she directed and produced BBC Bafta-nominated documentaries Swansea Living on the Streets and Selling Sex to Survive. Her first one-woman show, Lost, Found, Stolen, was developed through National Theatre Wales’ WalesLab programme and was performed at Sprint Festival at Camden’s People’s Theatre and Volcano Theatre. Her second show Bottled, developed with Greg Wohead and Justin Cliffe, was at Experimentica, Chapter, and Bristol Ferment. She was the recipient of the 2015 Creative Wales award and recently came runner-up in the Carne trust playwriting award at Sherman Theatre.

Ontario, Canada

Troy Hourie

Freaks | Experimentation with Mediated Shadow Puppetry

Freaks is a long-term passion project that was first premiered at Ei! Marionettas Festival in July 2019. Freaks is a performative installation that combines art installation, puppetry and media. It uses the Penny Dreadful story, “String of Pearls” (Sweeney Todd) as a narrative base, oddity dolls, and cabinets of wonder built from found objects (dolls) and antique Portuguese furniture. They were then manipulated by the artist to become a live performative installation.

In this iteration, I used techniques of improvisation to build a hybrid form of shadow puppetry using a Kodachrome Eight Model 70 film project, a live feed camera and video mapping with a software called Millumin. With these tools, I layered images of live shadows cast by the film projector, layers of live feed video of me manipulating the oddity dolls and video mapping techniques to layer video of the performance from 2019. Each set up was improvised and recorded a single time, so glitches are present and accepted. The entire group of videos was then edited and layered with an aural landscape.

Ontario, Canada

Truth Is…

A great leader and powerful public speaker of our time was noted for using thunderclap rhythm with a distinctive voice, blending ecstasy and despair. That has also been used as a description for the Truth Is … style. Their passion is only surpassed by a desire to explore & express the truth itself, and this becomes obvious when their poetry is spoken.

As a Queer, POC spoken word poet and speaker, Truth Is … takes a unique approach to talking about the intricacies of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and related traumas in a global and personal context. Their intersectional approach to these issues allows for the audience to explore experiences (or lack thereof) through an empathetic and compassionate lens fostering wellness, community, and resisting shame.

Previously opening for legendary activist Angela Davis, they have also headlined in several conferences focused on social equity, gender equality, labour safety, and youth motivation. They are current co-artistic director of not-for-profit arts organization Guelph Spoken Word and they have also been the past recipient of the Min Sook Lee Labour Arts Awards and Guelph’s Top 40 under 40.

Graphic with Graphite

As Black people are being murdered across the US and Canada at an alarming rate, “Graphic with Graphite” is a spoken word poem written and improvised to articulate the current state of grief being dealt with and the current uprising the world is facing during the 2020 Pandemic. #BlackLivesMatter

Ireland

Una Lee

Una Lee is co-presented by the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Belfast.

Una Lee is an artist working with sounds, stories, and sensations. She is in perpetual pursuit of found sound and ways for alternative storytelling. Many of her works, which are primarily sound-centered, incorporate interdisciplinary aspects and blend performance art, visual art, and theatre practice. Those works often address time, memory, human condition, and the environment. She holds MA and PhD in Sonic Arts.

A Skype Call Away

The title of my piece is an obvious variation of the phrase “a phone call way,” which addresses the possibility of psychological closeness between two people or more while physically distant. It is also taken from an unrealised idea for a piece that I had a few years back which would have taken the shape of one-to-one live performance via Skype calls. It was an idea that I held dear, prompting me to keep notes for it all these years. And now, the piece in the present form is an alternative, yet ultimately more relevant realisation of the original idea, thanks to the situation that has arisen. In this very special time in history, we—those with access to Internet and a device for it—are only a Skype call away from each other, despite various restrictions to global movement. Keeping the spirit of a live performance alive, in parts I’ve tried to emulate the sensation of an actual Skype call which then is purposefully destroyed. The piece also wraps up my personal experience of the full lockdown, during which I was based in Belfast, and tells you a little about that particular time of my life.

British Columbia, Canada

why choir

why choir is co-presented by the Coastal Jazz & Blues Society.

why choir is the improvised sonic explorations of duo Roxanne Nesbitt and Ben Brown. Roxanne pushes button beats. Ben swipes the air. Roxanne has a degree in double bass and in architecture. Ben is a two-time music school drop-out. Roxanne sings her soul as written on scattered bits of paper poetry. Ben’s drum kit is the world. Roxanne makes instruments for Ben to play. Ben made the first move. Roxanne is half-Trinidadian. They share mutual interests in the pitched mundane, reverberant spaces, and resonant sculptures. why choir is a semi-annual affair.

USA

William Parker & Patricia Nicholson

William’s early collaborations with the dancer and choreographer Patricia Nicholson created a large repertoire of composed music for ensembles ranging from solo works to big band projects. Parker played in the Cecil Taylor Unit from 1980 through 1991. He has also performed with musicians from the AACM such as Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Ernest Dawkins, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. He has also played with David S. Ware, Don Cherry, Bill Dixon, Grachan Monchur III, Dave Burrell, Charles Tyler, Gunter Hampel, Jeanne Lee, Milford Graves, Rashied Ali, Andrew Cyrille, Matthew Shipp, and Steve Swell. His latest piece, A Trail Of Tears music/dance/spoken word/film was presented at Roulette in January 2020. He is currently working on a piece about the Jewish holocaust called “Silhouette In The Dust.”

Patricia Nicholson’s dance is steeped in the free jazz aesthetic with attention to spiritual and social responsibility. Beginning with the belief that dance is the visual manifestation of sound and energy, Ms. Nicholson has developed a singular practice, one drawing from both traditional and unconventional techniques to create an eclectic yet intuitive approach to movement and composition. This same aesthetic is manifest in all her work from writing to organizing to being present in each moment. \Nicholson’s dance and poetry are featured in her active projects: What It Is Ensemble (co-led with William Parker and ft. James Brandon Lewis, Melanie Dyer, Devin Waldman and Gerald Cleaver); Revolution Resurrection (with art by William Mazza and music by TA Thompson and Jason Hwang); BLUE (with art by William Mazza and electronics by Val Jeanty); and Hope Cries for Justice, duos and trios with William Parker and Hamid Drake.

life is simple

This piece is an improvisation that that was created on June 19/20/21, 2020, using an iPhone 10.

We are on street having just put up some Black Lives banners. Sound and movement begins thru and behind a fence. We meet some ladies on the curb who liked the doson ngoni aka the hunters guitar from Mali. The next day we are at Juneteenth march calling to fund communities not Police. The reflection “Life Is Simple” segues into Little Bird as the sound of the string bass crosses the landscape.

Music: William Parker
Movement and Text: Patricia Nicholson
Editing: Miriam Parker

Photo credit: Eva Kapanadze

Quebec, Canada

Yoni & Leila

Yehonatan, or better known as Yon, immigrated to Quebec at the age of 8 where he pursued a musical education focusing on Piano performance. He returned to his homeland to finish high school at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. He was later recruited for three years in Israel’s compulsory military service. Before returning to Montreal, Yon traveled the world for a year, mostly in India, where he had the inspiration to devote his life to music. His pieces are conceived for a variety of instruments and ensembles, with recent projects focusing more on inclusion of instruments from non-western origin and electronic music. He draws on his experiences to create and encourage unity and environmental awareness. Today, back in Montreal, Yon performs his pieces regularly and pursues a bachelor degree in Music Composition and Anthropology at McGill University.

Leila is a musician, ethnomusicologist/anthropologist, arts and practice-based researcher, community worker, and activist who lives in Montreal. She has been playing the viola in classical and improvisational contexts for years. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow with the International Institution for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI). She is facilitating a research project with young Oromo women in Ethiopia that uses participatory, collaborative and improvisational audio and video methodologies. Overall, her work focuses on decolonizing research, teaching, and other structures through informed, ground-up, collaborative research and work. Through her improvisations she focuses on sharing and collaborating through music and other arts, and music as a site for sharing.

Yoni & Leila at The Open Door, Montreal

Yoni and Leila began improvising on sitar and viola at The Open Door day Centre in Montreal in May 2020. The Open Door is a drop-in centre and day shelter serving homeless and low-income people in downtown Montreal. Yoni contacted the shelter to volunteer, looking to share his art during the COVID-19 crisis. As the volunteer coordinator at the shelter, Leila met Yoni and they decided to work together to share music through an improvisation duo. Since then, they have been improvising during lunchtimes 2-3 times a week, so clients can listen while waiting in line and while eating. Both Yoni and Leila have backgrounds in Western classical music and have interests in arts of different cultures. They also share the interest of making music more accessible. Now each time Yoni and Leila play at the shelter, their music has become a space for exchange. The Open Door clients regularly come up to express their appreciation, to talk about their own music, to share their stories and comments, to ask questions, or to simply sit and listen. Some have also showed interest in joining the improvisation. This video was recorded in front of and inside the shelter at lunchtime during Yoni and Leila’s second week of improvising together.