Improvising Forward
Persevere, Repair, Sustain
An On-Line Colloquium presented by Coastal Jazz, Western Front, and the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (UBC)
Live-Streamed from Vancouver, Canada, Saturday and Sunday, June 20 and 21, 2020
Free and Open to the Public
Due to unforeseen circumstances, we’ve had to postpone the second day of the colloquium (originally scheduled to live-stream on Sunday, June 21). Please check the Western Front/CoastalJazz/IICSI websites in the coming weeks for the new date.
Click here for the Coastal Jazz YouTube Channel, to view the Live Stream for Sunday, June 21, 2020.
Recent weeks have witnessed changes and upheavals in people’s lives around the globe, as we face the impacts of a global pandemic and of a widespread crisis in social and racial justice. As we begin to learn how to confront our shared distances and to discover hopeful ways of coming together, the improvising arts, particularly music, offer significant opportunities to confront, to explore and to understand some of these vital changes.
The International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, at the University of British Columbia, presents this on-line colloquium in collaboration with Coastal Jazz and Western Front to offer musicians and artists an opportunity to engage with these issues in their own creative practices. How does music help us potentially to persevere in the face of crisis? In what ways does improvisation offer sustained hope or sustaining vitality? Does music of the moment, in the present tense, address the possibility of reparation, or of repairing our challenging relationships with each other and with the world? How might the improvising arts encourage communities to move forward?
Over the course of two days, Saturday June 20 and Sunday June 21, we will host a series of on-line presentations by Anna Webber and Angela Morris, Gerald Cleaver, Elisa Thorn and Robyn Jacob, Darius Jones, and Fay Victor. Audiences around the planet are warmly invited to listen to the talks, and to participate in on-line discussion with each of the presenters. The colloquium strives to uplift, elevate and support the work of significant improvising artists from around the world.
The Facebook Event page for Improvising Forward can be found here.
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Gerald Cleaver
Gerald Cleaver will present at Improvising Forward on Saturday, June 20, 2020, beginning at 3:00pm Pacific Daylight Savings Time. Information about Gerald Cleaver’s music can be found here and here. In 2014, Gerald Cleaver was interviewed for Modern Drummer magazine. An article on Gerald Cleaver, “Gerald Cleaver Bridges the Divide Between Structure and Freedom,” appeared in…
Angela Morris and Anna Webber
Anna Webber and Angela Morris will present at Improvising Forward on Saturday, June 20, 2020, beginning at 1:30pm Pacific Daylight Savings Time. Their recording Both Are True, by the Webber/Morris Big Band, was released in April, 2020, by Greenleaf Music, and is available on their Bandcamp page (among other on-line retailers).
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