About the work

Core Lessons

DO RULES HELP OR HINDER ORIGINALITY?

How do I as a composer build with originality from nearly limitless materials?

Do rules stifle creativity, or do they enable it?

Does creativity emerge by abandoning constraints, or by embracing them?

Inspirations

STORIES FROM CENTRAL ASIA AND THE CAUCASUS (2021)

Commissioned by Groundswell

GREAT BEAR RIVER BLUES (2018)

Created through the generosity of Edward Epstein for the Mosaïque Project

CORONA DIVINAE MISERICORDIAE (2017)

Commissioned by The Sweetwater Music Festival

CONCERTO NO.1 "JOYA" (2023)

For Mark Fewer, David Braid and the Prague Epoque Chamber Strings

Outreach

MUSICAL EXPERIMENTS WITH DAVID BRAID

Collaborating in 2018 with the 'TUMO Center for Creative Technologies' in Yerevan, Armenia. Working with students creating the following work:

TUMO MUSIC · TUMOians Potpourri

30 YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS BETWEEN CANADA AND UZBEKISTAN

Coverage of Concerts, Masterclasses, and Collaborations in Tashkent (2022)

How a Polish-sailor-turned-British-novelist helped me find a voice as an improviser

It was the author Joseph Conrad whose ideas about "the main task" of art inspired a significant change in how I thought about my goals as a creative musician. In his preface to a novel published in 1897, he wrote, "A work that aspires, however humbly, to the status of art should carry its justification in every line." In other words, an artist's work is economical in expression so that every element contributes in a vital way to the completeness of that work. It was this insight which caused me to...

From CBC Radio 2

CBC – This year is the 250th Anniversary of Mozart’s birth and you’ve said “Mozart got you into Jazz". Tell us how.

DB - To answer that, let's go back to 1991, the 200th anniversary of Mozart's death - not an event on any normal teenager’s calendar, certainly not mine. But that suddenly changed...

On Defining Jazz

Consider some responses to the question "What is Jazz?" by some of the original creators: "If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know," said Louis Armstrong. This statement, and a similar one attributed to Fats Waller, suggest that jazz is only intuitively known. Thelonious Monk also echoes this idea: "I don't have a definition of jazz...you're just supposed to know it when you hear it." From another perspective, Bill Evans tries to distinguish what jazz is not: "...it bugs me when people try to analyse jazz as an intellectual theorem... it's not. It's feeling." Despite the aesthetic differences among these highly influential artists, one consistently finds an absence of definitive musical traits in their statements. Instead, their responses address feeling and...