My artistic process focuses on a holistic understanding of music, considering the traditions, the environment, the physics, the movement, and the spirituality of the sounds with which I engage in the present moment.
Growing up in a bi-cultural family in the multicultural city of Montreal, Canada, the melding of traditions and cultures is embedded in how I perceive, experience and engage with the world. This transmits to my artistic practice where I constantly seek out and include varied cultural influences, learning from them within the context of my work and beyond. This consciousness has led, for example, to my recent studies of microtonality in relation to the traditions that utilize it. I think it’s of crucial importance to continue to confront myself with what has been obscured by the homogeneity of western living, cultural erasure and commercial consumerist values, in the hopes of gaining progressive enlightenment and greater fulfillment by constantly encountering the multiplicity of human experience and expression.
My musical practice being principally informed by jazz music (black american music, american classical music), I pay particular attention to improvisation and rhythm structures from the African diaspora and continent, along with the concepts and philosophies that surround these practices. I’ve been fortunate to be mentored by masters in NYC, Havana and Montreal. Although I do not necessarily compose in these traditions, I bring the sensibilities and considerations that were transmitted to me and offer my personal expression in light of these learnings within my compositions. Over the years I've composed regularly for my own big band, other jazz orchestras and smaller jazz ensembles. In the last few years I've had the chance to write for choir, art song, brass band, as well as work with dancers and multimedia. As a performer and composer, spontaneity is central to my work, an aspect encouraged and developed by my studies in jazz and years of living in New York City. I feel that most of my work to date is a reflection of becoming. This “becoming” happens by asking the questions of how, what and where we become, individually and collectively. In the constant call and response that is life, we become as we engage. I am interested in the spiritual, ritualistic and sacred expressions of music, and the way in which sound accompanies or ignites altered states of consciousness in physical and metaphysical experiences. Most recently I've explored this through the lens of gender and spirituality, with my piece DIVA for jazz orchestra, an ode to the divine feminine. I will soon begin work on a sister piece relating this time to the sacred masculine energies.
My study path has been marked by various self-directed activities related to any subject that inspires me. At the end of my university career, my dwindling interest in performance was replaced by a pressing need for creation. In those early years, I avoided all formal instruction in order to protect and nurture my budding inner creative world from what often felt like hostile environments. Yet, I still sought all types of knowledge on music and art, and made various serendipitous encounters that shaped my artistry. Many of these studies did not deal with composition directly, but rather informed me on what I wanted to express as a composer. Thankfully with time, experience, and growing in self-assuredness, I was able to seek and accept increasingly more instruction specific to composition.
