Performers

Colloquium Day 2

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Click below to see participant biographies. All events at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre.

Panel: “The Great Divide?: Eurological and Afrological Perspectives on Improvisation”

Panel: “Free Improvisation, Education, and Cultural Dynamics”

Workshop: “Improvising Across Borders: Approaches to Cultural Expression”

Panel: “Transcending Genre and Language”

Panel: “Fostering Dissent, Building Communities”

Keynote Talk: “Jazz/Opera and the Staging of Race”

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Alexandre Pierrepont

Panel: “The Great Divide?: Eurological and Afrological Perspectives on Improvisation”
Thursday, September 4, 9:00 – 10:30 am

Alexandre Pierrepont is a social and cultural anthropologist, working at Université Paris-VII and Sciences Po (France), who specializes in the internal alterations (at the corner of otherness and togetherness) of the Western World and in the African American musical continuum as a social institution. He completed his PhD on the AACM. Pierrepont is also a writer (Le Champ jazzistique, Parenthèses, 2002), translator (William Parker’s Sound Journal, Jalan /Sons d’hiver, 2004) and artistic adviser for labels and festivals.

Abstract
“Cultural Triangulations – Yorubas and New Yorubas Across the Black Atlantic”

This presentation is the product of a Paris seminar, conducted in conjunction with Mike Ladd, that explored different figures (thinkers, writers, painters or musicians and their works) from what Paul Gilroy called the "Black Atlantic", and used them as vehicles or vessels to move from one continent to the other, from one century to the other, backwards and forwards, in a search for new but positive "middle passages" between the social and the cultural worlds. The class focused on different urban centers that functioned as crucial meeting points in fostering cultural and racial cross-fertilization throughout history, with the understanding that different modes of globalization or cosmopolitanism have been active for centuries and are integral to the African Diaspora. Alexandre Pierrepont will be focusing specifically on the fourth class of the seminar, “Yorubas and New Yorubas”.

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Brent Mix

Panel: “The Great Divide?: Eurological and Afrological Perspectives on Improvisation”
Thursday, September 4, 9:00 – 10:30 am

Brent Mix is pursuing his doctorate in English at Northwestern University, where he has studied with Kevin Bell and Brian Edwards. His dissertation explores the emergence of American New Criticism in its historical context through engagements with the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the critical reception of Hart Crane. His work on jazz and improvisation is currently seeking a home.

Abstract
“Idiom and Empire: The Historicity of Free Improvisation”

Through covert political action and capitalist global expansion, American "jazz" became the sound of empire. "Jazz" musicians of Europe and Asia faced the option of playing in an American musical style or not playing at all in a market driven by the American dollar. The response was to generate a non-idiomatic style that would reject reference to jazz and therefore the language of the imperial power. My project investigates the development of European non-idiomatic improvisation as a historical event. I argue that improvisers emerging and drawing from jazz traditions and non-idiomatic improvisers manifest different reactions to the same stimulus: that of the American cultural imperialism of the Cold War era.

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Alan Stanbridge

Panel: “The Great Divide?: Eurological and Afrological Perspectives on Improvisation”
Thursday, September 4, 9:00 – 10:30 am

Dr. Alan Stanbridge is an Assistant Professor in Visual and Performing Arts and Arts Management at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed in Music and Museum Studies. Stanbridge is the recipient of a Faculty Teaching Award for his contribution to undergraduate teaching. Drawing on a diverse range of musical examples from the early 20th Century to the present day, Stanbridge’s interdisciplinary research focuses on the manner in which a variety of discourses have served to shape contemporary understandings of musical meaning and cultural value. His research project is supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Stanbridge has published articles on popular music, jazz history, cultural policy, and cultural theory, and he is currently working on a book entitled Rhythm Changes: The Discourses of Jazz, to be published by Routledge. He is a contributor to the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, and a member of the Editorial Boards of the International Journal of Cultural Policy and the Jazz Research Journal. His past includes a 15-year career in professional arts management and music promotion in Britain, where he was Director of the Glasgow International Jazz Festival, among other posts.

Abstract
“The Day will Come: Discourses of African-American Authenticity and European Improvised Music”

In this paper, focusing especially on the British jazz and improvised music scene, I examine the manner in which such stereotypes (in George Lewis’ comparative analysis of AACM and European approaches to improvisation) simply neglect the full range – both historical and current – of contemporary music-making practices evident in that scene: practices which – although drawing early influence from African-American models, as musicians such as Evan Parker (see Wickes, 1999: 98) and Trevor Watts (see Watts, 1973; and Ansell, 1979) have freely acknowledged – owe little in their ensuing developments to late Coltrane (or, indeed, to subsequent American forms), and reveal a distinctive approach to exploring the interface between improvisation and composition, whether in the work of Barry Guy, John Stevens, Keith Tippett, Tony Oxley, or Howard Riley. Moreover, in addition to the contributions of British ‘second generation’ musicians, from Django Bates to Spring Heel Jack, the gloriously diasporic work of figures such as Joe Harriott, Chris McGregor, Dudu Pukwana, and Harry Miller represents a unique contribution to the development of specifically non-American forms of jazz and improvised music.

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Mark Laver

Panel: “The Great Divide?: Eurological and Afrological Perspectives on Improvisation”
Thursday, September 4, 9:00 – 10:30 am

Mark Laver is a PhD student in Ethnomusicology at the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. He has been published in several academic and non-academic journals, including SAGAR, Discourses, The Recorder, and Canadian Musician. He has presented papers at CUMS, the Asian Graduate Studies Conference at the University of Texas at Austin, and as part of the Faculty of Music’s colloquium series. His dissertation research is focused on the use of jazz in marketing. Mark is also a busy working saxophonist in Toronto; in 2005, he was featured in the music periodical La Scena Musicale as one of Canada’s Rising Stars. His research is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council.

Abstract
“America’s Classical Music: Jazz, Elitism, and the Meaning of Blackness”

The jazz meta-narrative is a tale that traces both the ascendency of a low-brow music into a high art form, and the entry of a marginalized African-American population into the establishment of American society. In many respects, the sound of jazz has been the sound of social change. Since the 1990s, however, with its growing prevalence in five-star hotel lobbies and luxury car commercials, jazz has increasingly become a signifier of bourgeois sophistication, elegance, and elitism. This paper posits reasons for this semiotic shift, and explores the implications of the changing meaning of jazz on the popular conception of blackness.

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Melvin Backstrom

Panel: “Free Improvisation, Education, and Cultural Dynamics”
Thursday, September 4, 9:00 – 10:00 am

Melvin Backstrom is presently a Master’s of Musicology student at McGill University with his research focusing on theoretical and practical understandings of contemporary musical communities (jambands, electronica, post-rock/jazz most notably) in which improvisation plays an integral role. His undergraduate studies were at Grant MacEwan College, where he received diplomas in jazz guitar performance and recording engineering/composition, and the University of Alberta—receiving a BA (Combined Honours) in music and philosophy, and writing his honours thesis on a critical examination of Adorno’s views on popular music. Prior to his arrival at McGill in the Fall of 2007 he lived in Taiwan for two years teaching English to pre-school children through adults while also being heavily involved in a number of different musical groups performing a wide variety of musical styles. He has worked as a tree planter in Western Canada over six seasons, as a showband guitarist on cruise ships, and has also hitchhiked over large parts of North America. While the (non-classical) guitar is his primary instrument, he also plays keyboards, does a great deal of work with the real-time musical manipulation software Ableton Live and plays a mean jaw-harp.

Abstract
“Improvisation as Freedom? A Bourdieuian Critique of Creative Action”

Given the, at least rhetorical, importance of improvisation in various contemporary musical practices an interrogation of its contextual meaning is called for in order to answer a number of questions. These include: how “free” its practice is, the styles of music that performers choose to improvise with, the roles played by different performers within an improvising group and the way in which value judgments are made by those who are involved with improvised music—be these to justify the practice itself, or in the moment-to-moment decisions that improvisers engage in while making music, and that audience members engage in while responding to it. This I will do by exploring how Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural capital, field, habitus, doxa and symbolic violence both help explain these social dynamics as well as their limitations in this regard.

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Simon Rose

Panel: “Free Improvisation, Education, and Cultural Dynamics”
Thursday, September 4, 9:00 – 10:00 am

As a musician, Simon Rose’s interest in free-improvisation has developed by exploring the possibilities created by limiting himself to the alto saxophone. He has focused on solo playing for a number of years, the live/extended performance aspect leading to the release of ‘Procession’ (FMR 2007). In 2007, he undertook a solo tour in England.

His long-term involvement in the trio ‘badland’ with Steve Noble and Simon Fell has resulted in several tours, three CD releases to wide critical acclaim and a BBC Jazz on Three session (2005). Recent collaborations have been with Adam Bohman, Rhodri Davies, Steve Noble, Mark Sanders, the London Improvisers Orchestra and others.

As an experienced teacher (initially in drama and theatre in education,) he has worked in schools, colleges and more recently as a visiting lecturer in universities. His research has developed through the inclusion of practice-based activity and has focused on developing understanding of the potential of creative processes, in this case free improvisation, for broad aims in education. Much of his experience in education has been from working with those described as with ‘special educational needs’ or ‘excluded’. He completed an MA (professional practice, Middlesex University 2008) and will be embarking on a PhD in September.

Abstract
“Articulating Perspectives on Free Improvisation for Education”

This paper will describe a recent research project exploring the potential of free improvisation for education, its aim, methodology, findings, conclusions, and development ideas. It focuses on ‘articulating perspectives of free improvisation for education’. Practicing musicians were interviewed in order to discern and describe what improvisation is in three locations: Bay Area of California, USA; London and other cities in the UK; and Helsinki, Finland. Through the pilot of the study, developed in California, interviews were initiated utilizing semi-structured and unstructured methods. Teaching, performing and visiting lecturing provided the settings for the research work. The participant observation part of the project involved over twenty performances ranging from a solo tour, monthly performances with the London Improvisers Orchestra, a large performance piece involving approximately one hundred and fifty musicians, other large groups and a number of small groups. A literature review was carried out exploring work done in the area. This involved a multi-disciplinary search in order to gain understanding of the phenomena, its musicological, psychological, philosophical and social character. Analysis of the data utilized a grounded theory approach. Thirty-seven features were reduced to four and subsequently a conceptualization of free improvisation developed, embodying the characteristics.

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Improvising Across Borders: Approaches to Cultural Expression

Workshop, Thursday, September 4, 10:45 – 11:45 am

Sal Ferreras (host), François Houle, Amir Koushkani, René Lussier, Kevin Breit, John Kameel Farah

See bios: SAFA, René Lussier and Kevin Breit, and John Kameel Farah.

Members of SAFA join ace guitarists Lussier and Breit and pianist Farah to explore adventures in cross-border collaboration. All these musicians have a wealth of experience in playing across genres and in cultural contexts that range from Latin drumming to Persian song, from musique actuelle to electronics.

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François Houle and Sal Ferreras

Panel: “Transcending Genre and Language”
Thursday, September 4, 2:15 – 3:30 pm

“SAFA and the Crosspollination of Ideas and Cultures”

See SAFA's bio.

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Rob Wallace

Panel: “Transcending Genre and Language”
Thursday, September 4, 2:15 – 3:30 pm

Rob Wallace holds the Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He writes on improvisation, modernism, and poetry, and he is also an active percussionist in a number of musical settings. Dr. Wallace is a post-doctoral fellow in the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice Project at the University of Guelph for 2008/09.

Abstract
“‘In a Troubled Key’: Langston Hughes in Performance”

My presentation investigates the successes and failure of Langston Hughes’s musico-poetic projects, focusing primarily on The Weary Blues, which in many ways is essentially an adaptation of his modernist long poem Montage as a Dream Deferred. I also look at Hughes’s additional performances with jazz groups, such as his work with pianist and composer Randy Weston. I argue that the fundamental issue at stake in these collaborations is not how to adapt words to music per se, but rather how to successfully integrate an aesthetics of improvisation within music and language.

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Maria Farinha

Panel: “Transcending Genre and Language”
Thursday, September 4, 2:15 – 3:30 pm

Pre-eminent in Brazil and the U.S.A. for more than 20 years, Farinha is recognized world-wide as one of the definitive Brazilian Jazz vocalists of her generation, one of “The Best Brazilian Divas” and one of “The Best Latin Divas” (Mark Holston for Hispanic Magazine, California). Since the '80s at the Night Stage in Cambridge, Boston and also her appearance at the City Jazz, Florida, she has been refining the art of interpreting her own compositions and the songs of composers like the late Antonio Carlos Jobim. She has a Bachelor degree in Music and studied at Berklee College of Music, Rollins College, and University of South Florida. She is finishing her Masters studies in Composition at York University as well as working as a performer and teacher. Maria Farinha studied voice with Novie Greene (Florida) and Helly Anne Caram (Sao Paulo). She has worked with many of Brazil's top stars, including Manfredo Fest, Romero Lubambo, Gilberto Gil and with other jazz artists such as Arturo Sandoval, Danny Gottlieb, Giovanni Hidalgo, Richie Zellon, and Richard Drexler. She has taught Jazz Vocal, and Jazz Ensembles at the Berklee College of Music subsidiary in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Abstract
“The Other Side of Jobim”

Any attempt to theorize about Antonio Carlos Jobim’s compositions will necessarily discuss the relationship between music, revolution, and politics in modern Brazil. This paper establishes the trajectory of Jobim as a classical and popular composer dating from the period before the onset of Bossa Nova between 1953 and 1960. It focuses on the convergence of the Bossa Nova movement, President Juscelino Kubitschek’s development policies, and the emergence of the “Modern Song” genre. The analysis addressed in this paper exposes new criteria for the evaluation of Brazilian Popular Music. During those years, a new music genre called “Modern Song,” would establish the young musician Jobim as the main articulator of the disqualification of Brazilian musical elements considered aesthetically antiquated. The work of Jobim at that transitional period in musical taste reflected elements subsequently incorporated and, at the same time, rejected by the aesthetics of the Bossa Nova musicians. The paper does not analyze Jobim’ songs, harmonic arrangements, or rhythmic characterization, but exposes the concept of his music and the intricacies of his trajectory in a critical and sociological perspective.

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Hafez Modirzadeh

Panel: “Transcending Genre and Language”
Thursday, September 4, 2:15 – 3:30 pm

Hafez Modirzadeh is a tenor saxophonist and composer/theorist whose original cross-cultural “chromodal” approach was recognized with a Ph.D. from Wesleyan University in 1992, and has since been the subject of extensive lecturing and recording. Having performed with such artists as Omar Sosa, Steve Lacy, Fred Ho, Oliver Lake, Don Cherry, and Ornette Coleman, Dr. Modirzadeh’s most recent CD release, Bemsha Alegria (Disques Chromodal 005), is the result of his collaboration with Flamencos and Gnawans in Andalusia, while serving a 2006 Fulbright Senior Lectureship at the University of Granada, in Spain. From 1990-98, he developed the Improvised Music Studies Program at San Jose State University, and is currently a Professor of Music at San Francisco State University.

Abstract
“Rising Partials Realizing Sound Come-Unity: Makam X and the Afro-Diasporic Un-Conscious”

The human experience has always relied upon a continuum of fixed and fluid intervallic activity, or migratory dispersal, which constantly intersects and shape-shifts perceptions of self in relation to source and society. Musical cultural distinctions arising from physical relocation share in another kind of dispersal as well: that of an elemental aural archetype here termed “Makam X”, placed most generally within an Afro-Diasporic Sound Community, but also moving beyond all geographical and historical reference points. Considering Heraclitus’ idea that “the hidden harmony is better than the obvious one”, what could the “hidden” be, then, hinging Persian dastgah, African American blues, and Andalucian flamenco, with, say, Filipino kulintang?

As the Sanscrit term ranj relates both to color in Iran (rang) and tonality in India (rag), the parallel dispersions of both sound and light spectrums transform through the humanly creative. By naming this sound spectrum “Makam X” --- previously called the overtone (or harmonic) series --- intertextual signifying occurs: one inclusive “Makam” (Arabic for “musical system”) containing partials of a universal order interrelated by “X”, which illuminates all improvised musics (i.e. aural/oral traditions) of the world with a “just” intonation that eternally defies any static concept of uniformity which may oppress creative diversity (i.e. the tonal hegemony of “equal” temperament). In divine proportion, Makam X rises from a sea of shifting sources, a nautilus of cryptic spiral harmony, signifying in sound the reason why Malcolm remained “X”: as long as the prejudice against race and class that produced it persists, it becomes a symbol for unity beyond any individual or cultural group. Likewise, the 10th-12th partials from Maqam “X” hold the potential for modal co-existence between any/all human sound systems.

Original inter-cultural performance excerpts between selected improvised practices are shown to suggest that through the understanding of interrelated partials of sound, we may be able to find ways to restore partials of our own humanity as well, and in so doing, understand improvisation more as a series of perpetual variations on Life.

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François Mouillot

Panel: “Fostering Dissent, Building Communities”
Thursday, September 4, 2:15 - 3:00 pm

François Mouillot has spent this past year in the graduate department of Ethnomusicology at York University, and is currently working towards a Masters degree in European Studies at the University of Guelph. His academic research focuses on the ties between popular and traditional musics, identity-building and nationalism in the Basque Country. He developed a keen interest in Basque cultural minority musics and their significance in broader political and cultural contexts over the course of his Bachelor of Arts in Music at the University of Guelph. François plays the guitar and toys with a number of electronic and noise instruments, and has experience as an improviser through the University of Guelph’s Contemporary Music Ensemble and several projects blending popular and experimental musical aesthetics. His other interests include philosophy, politics, traveling and surfing in his native land, France

Abstract
“Resisting Poems: Expressions of Dissent and Hegemony in Modern Baroque Bertsolaritza”

This paper will examine the relationship between modern bertsolaritza, a traditional improvised form of Basque sung poetry, and its sociopolitical context. The practice of bertsolaritza exemplifies the ancient Basque oral traditions, but its recent fundamental evolutions, institutionalization and renewed popularity also make it one of the most significant instruments of the Basque modern cultural revival. Bertsolaritza then functions both as tool for the construction of Basque national hegemony as well as an expression of dissent and resistance to cultural forces exterior to the Basque Country. The concepts of improvisation as resistance and as a process of identity-building will be discussed in relation to Basque authenticity and ethnicity.

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Lee Veeraraghavan

Panel: “Fostering Dissent, Building Communities”
Thursday, September 4, 2:15 - 3:00 pm

Lee Veeraraghavan completed her BMus and MA degrees in music theory at the University of Western Ontario. She currently resides in Hamilton, from whence she has been commuting to teach music theory courses at various schools, including Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of Guelph, and the University of Waterloo. She plans to apply for doctoral programs in Ethnomusicology this fall, and her broad areas of interest are music as a means of empowering marginalized groups, and the role of music in religious ceremony.

Abstract
“Improvised Hip Hop and Community Building Across First Nations Youth”

The recitation of improvised raps, or freestyle, is an important activity within the hip hop community. Freestyle is most often performed within a group or in front of an audience, and it is the reaction of the crowd that encourages the performer. A vibrant sense of community is thus created. Despite being a relatively young art form, rap music has transcended national and cultural boundaries. Some believe that its appeal stems from its potentially empowering message. The wide range of possible subject matter, however, would suggest that it is something in the medium itself that is so appealing. This paper examines freestyle’s capacity for community building among First Nations youth in Canada.

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Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon

Keynote Talk, Thursday, September 4, 3:45 – 4:45 pm

Co-sponsored by TransCanada Institute

Michael and Linda Hutcheon are not siblings, but a married couple—and both teach at the University of Toronto, though in different faculties. Linda holds the rank of University Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Michael Hutcheon is Professor of Medicine and Deputy Physician in Chief for Education at the Toronto Health Network. LH is the author of nine (solo) books on contemporary culture and theory; MH has published widely in the fields of medical education as well as lung transplantation. The two have worked collaboratively and across their very different disciplines on the intersection of medical and cultural history, using opera as their vehicle of choice. They have given many lectures and published a number of articles and three books so far:

Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (1996); Bodily Charm: Living Opera (2000); Opera: The Art of Dying (2004). They are currently studying creativity and aging through the late style and later lives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century opera composers.

Abstract
“Jazz/Opera and the Staging of Race”

Arguably, jazz has been a "racialized" art from the start, but so too, in a different way, has opera. When these two very different musical modes come together on stage, as they do in D.D. Jackson and George Elliott Clarke's Québecité, (commissioned by the Guelph Jazz Festival for its 10th anniversary) issues of race, multiculturalism, and diaspora are foregrounded in provocative ways.