Improvising Futures: Sound Futures, Future Sounds

Colloquium with the Vancouver International Jazz Festival and Western Front, June 27-29, 2023

All events take place in the Grand Luxe Hall of Western Front (303 E 8th Ave).

All sessions are free of charge and open to the public. Everyone is welcome!

The International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) has collaborated with Coastal Jazz since 2007 to host an annual colloquium in Vancouver: an open public gathering of artists, academics and community members to discuss and support the transformative work of the improvisational arts. In 2023, as part of the Vancouver International Jazz Festival, IICSI is co-curating along with Coastal Jazz—and supported by Western Front—the first of five colloquia under the title “Improvising Futures,” which is the name of our new federally-funded research partnership. Improvising Futures aims to invite diverse cultural perspectives into conversation, to expand the scope and depth of interdisciplinary research on improvisation, and to put knowledge into practice through collaborative community initiatives. “Improvisation,” award-winning IICSI researchers Ajay Heble, Daniel Fischlin and George Lipsitz have written, “is the creation and development of new, unexpected, and productive cocreative relations among people. It cultivates the capacity to discern elements of possibility, potential, hope, and promise where none are readily apparent.” For this year’s colloquium, Western Front will host conversations around the theme of “Sound Futures, Future Sounds.”

 
Click here to access the complete Festival Guide for the 2023 Vancouver International Jazz Festival. (The IF colloquium is listed on page 10.)
Click here to access the homepage for Western Front.
Click here to access the homepage for the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation.

Schedule of Events

Tuesday June 27

11:00am

Live Comics Drawing Jam! (Featuring musical improvisations by trumpeter Bill Clark)

Improvising Futures has invited the UBC Comics Studies Research Cluster to take part in a live comics-drawing improv session, in collaboration with one of Vancouver’s finest improvising musicians. Everyone is welcome, regardless of skill level. Pens, pencils and paper will be provided. Come out and enjoy some creative fun!

12:30pm

Talk and Demonstration by Aram Bajakian, “Leo Tutunjian 1938: The Story of An Oud’s Journey to Vancouver.”

3:00pm

Artist Discussion with Sona Jobarteh, moderated by Julia Ulehla.

Wednesday June 28

3:00pm

Artist Workshop / Discussion with Zoh Amba and Farida Amadou, moderated by Dylan van der Schyff.

Thursday June 29

11:00am

Open Community Discussion of the Improvising Futures research initiative and partnership grant. This grant has research sites around the world, and focuses on four main research streams: (1) Improvisation, Media, and Stories of Change; (2) Improvisation, Public Spaces, and the Practice of Everyday Life; (3) Improvisation, Decolonization, and Making Peace; and (4) Improvisation, Wellbeing, and the Social Determinants of Health. We will discuss some of the aims and collaborative possibilities that Improvising Futures will put into practice in the coming five years, and will look for public, academic and creative input on what people might want to see happen around the study of improvisation and the support for the improvising arts. All are welcome to this table.

12:30pm

Artist Talk by Lisa Cay Miller, “Creative spaces and collective collaboration: hidden labour, public play.”

University of British Columbia Improvising Futures Researchers

Dr. Kevin McNeilly (UBC Site Co-ordinator), Department of English Language and Literatures

Dr. Phanuel Antwi, Department of English Language and Literatures

Prof. Joel Bakan, Peter Allard School of Law

Dr. Dylan Robinson, UBC School of Music

Prof. Tom Scholte, Department of Theatre and Film

Improvising Futures: Notes on Presenters

Farida Amadou (b.1989) is a self taught bass player based in Liège, Belgium. The electric bass is her main instrument since 2011. In 2013, she has started to play a lot of different musical genres, including blues, jazz and hip-hop. The same year, she had a big interest on improvised music when she met L’Oeil Kollectif members and started to play with percussionist/ drummer Tom Malmendier. Nystagmus duo was born in late 2014. Since 2014, she has performed with many musicians all over Europe: Linda Sharrock, Mario Rechtern, Balasz Pandi, Karl H. Bjora, Jasper Stadhouders, Onno Govaert, Eve Risser, Morgane Carnet, Philippe Lemoine, Timothée Quost, Julien Desprez, Olivier Benoit, Anil Eraslan, Mette Rasmussen, Basile Naudet, Chris Pitsiokos, Alex Ward, Thursthon Moore, etc. In May 2018, she has started a new duo project with the drummer based in London, Steve Noble, including trio collaborations with Alex Ward on clarinet, Chris Pitsiokos on saxophone, ex Sonic Youth’s guitarist Thurston Moore on guitar and recently with the free jazz pioneer Peter Brötzmann. Amadou and Pavel Tchikov released a tape called ‘Mal de terre’ on the Chicago based label trouble in Minds records on November 2021.

Zoh Amba is a composer, saxophonist, and flutist from Tennessee. Her music blends avant-garde, noise, and devotional hymns. Before studying music at the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music, New England Conservatory and studying with David Murray in New York, she spent most of her time writing and practicing saxophone in the forest near her home. Today, her powerfully unique avant-garde music is full of folk melodies, mesmerizing refrains, and repeated incantations. Amba released two records in 2022, her debut record O, Sun which was produced by John Zorn and released on the prestigious label Tzadik. Zoh
Amba’s second record, Bhakti, features Micah Thomas, Tyshawn Sorey, and Matt Hollenberg. She has collaborated with a variety of high profile musicians such as Jim White (Dirty Three), legendary jazz bassist William Parker, Brian Chase (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), etc. Amba has also performed at well respected venues and festivals Roulette (NY), Ars Nova Presents (Philadelphia), Vision Festival (NY), and Angel City Jazz Festival (LA) along with a 2023 Big Ears Festival’s performance.

The music of guitarist and composer Aram Bajakian has been called “a masterpiece” (fRoots, July 2017), “shape-shifting” (FreeJazzCollective, January 2017), and “sometimes delicate, sometimes punishing” (Chicago Reader, January 2018). As a guitarist, "the virtuosic jack of all trades" (Village Voice, May 2015) has toured extensively with Lou Reed, Madeleine Peyroux, John Zorn and Diana Krall, performing at many of the world’s greatest venues, including Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall, the Acropolis, L’Olympia, as well as the Montreaux, Newport, Monterey and Antibes jazz festivals, among others. From 2018-2021 Bajakian served as the New Music Curator at Western Front in Vancouver, one of Canada’s leading artist-run centers for contemporary art and new music. Bajakian received his Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he studied with Dr. Yusef Lateef. He holds a Master of Arts Degree in Music Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and Master of Music degree in Music Composition from the University of British Columbia. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, where his advisor is Dr. Nathan Hesselink. His research focuses on contemporary musicians throughout the Armenian diaspora. 

Bill Clark has been active in Vancouver’s jazz community as a trumpet player, composer and educator for the last 40 years. He has been a featured soloist and composer with multiple award-winning ensembles, including the Vancouver Ensemble of Jazz Improvisation (VEJI), The Bill Clark Sextet, The Hard Rubber Orchestra, The New Orchestra Workshop (NOW), The Powder Blues, The Electric Miles Band and the acclaimed improvisation ensemble, Talking Pictures. Sought after as a clinician and educator, Bill is known for his inspired ability to foster and develop an environment of curiosity, exploration, improvisation and community in students from kindergarten to adult. As such Bill has been faculty at many of BC’s top Jazz Workshops; including the Delta, Okanagan, Douglas College, Courtenay and Kwantlen College Jazz workshops. Currently Bill is working with the VSO School of Music Jazz Faculty, and teaches music at Ecole Salish Secondary in Surrey, BC. Bill has his Masters Degree with a focus on improvisation from the prestigious California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) where he worked closely with Bassist Charlie Haden and Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith.

Sona Jobarteh is a unique and pioneering musical icon of her time whose renown has been rapidly flourishing globally. Born into a Griot family from the Gambia, a tradition that dates back seven centuries, she is the first female within this tradition to become a professional virtuoso on the Kora. Her music is uniquely poised between the preservation of her rich cultural heritage and an accessible, modern style that relates to the current era and to audiences from all over the world. At the heart of her success as an artist is her dedication to humanitarian activism in the areas of social development and educational reform on the continent of Africa.  She is the Founding Director of The Gambia Academy, an institution dedicated educational reform for Africans on the continent of Africa.

Lisa Cay Miller

Vocalist/composer/devisor/actress/ethnomusicologist Julia Ulehla was born in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1978. Born to a Czech refugee-émigré father and Cherokee-Welsh mother, Julia spent a peripatetic childhood across the US, Europe, and the South Pacific. With her husband guitarist Aram Bajakian in 2011, she initiated a new line of performance research based on the ancestral song tradition of her father’s lineage, sourcing folk songs collected and transcribed by her great-grandfather, biologist Vladimír Úlehla. A meditation on the role of heritage in the modern world, her project Dálava is often described as shamanic and primordial. With improvisers and experimental musicians Aram Bajakian, Peggy Lee, Dylan van der Schyff, Tyson Naylor, and Colin Cowan, Dálava has appeared in a variety of contexts from experimental to sacred to post-rock to traditional, including FIMAV, Suoni per il popolo, TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival, Festival de Arte Sacro, Colours of Ostrava, Bimhuis, Vancouver Folk Festival, and the Strážnice International Folklore Festival, among others. She completed a PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of British Columbia, where she received the Killam Doctoral Scholarship. Recent publications include an English translation of Chapter VI of her great-grandfather’s book Živá píseň (Living Song, 1949) and a métissage co-authored chapter with Indigenous Elders, Knowledge Keepers, scholars and cultural practitioners Manulani Aluli-Meyer, Mariel Belanger, Jill Carter, Corrine Derickson, Delphine Derickson, Claire Fogal, Vicki Kelly, Carolyn Kenney, Virginie Magnat, Joseph Naytowhow, and Winston Wuttunee, titled “Experiencing Resonance as a Practice of Ritual Engagement” in Research and Reconciliation: Unsettling Ways of Knowing through Indigenous Relationships (2019).

Dylan van der Schyff is an improvising percussionist and a researcher in interdisciplinary musicology. He received his PhD from Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), and holds master’s degrees in humanities (Simon Fraser University) and music psychology (University of Sheffield). His postdoctoral work was hosted by the Faculty of Music at the University Oxford, and was funded by a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Dylan’s scholarship draws on developments in embodied cognitive science, phenomenological philosophy, and musicology to explore questions related to how and why music is meaningful for human beings. Dylan’s published work appears in journals that cover a broad spectrum of fields in the sciences and humanities. He is co-author of Musical Bodies, Musical Minds: Enactive Cognitive Science and the Meaning of Human Musicality (2022, MIT Press). As a performer (percussion, electronics) and producer, Dylan has contributed to almost 200 recordings, spanning the fields of jazz, free improvisation, sound art, experimental, electronic, and ‘new music’. He has toured extensively in North America and Europe, performing and recording with artists such as George Lewis, John Butcher, Kenny Werner, Dave Douglas, Achim Kaufmann, Misha Mengelberg, Michael Moore, Rob Mazurek, Marilyn Crispell, Joelle Leandre, Peggy Lee, Evan Parker, and John Zorn among many others. Dylan is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (University of Melbourne) where he convenes the honours and graduate programs in Jazz and Improvisation. He also lectures in drumming, rhythm studies, ensemble practice, and other areas.