Claire Devlin is a saxophonist and composer based in Montreal. She released her debut album “Anyone” in 2020 and currently co-leads two collectives based in Montreal: the Plastic Waste Band and Bellbird. Claire performs regularly with various ensembles including the Canadian National Jazz Orchestra, the Orchestre national de jazz de Montréal, Rommel Ribeiro, Thus Owls, Christine Jensen’s “Equal=Orchestra”, Warren Spicer’s “Unessential Oils”, and Tommy Crane’s “Dance Music For All Occasions”.

Claire grew up in Ottawa, Canada and started playing saxophone at the age of 12. In 2012, she was the recipient of the Rising Young Star award at the Prince Edward County Jazz Festival. Soon after, she moved to Montreal to study music at McGill University. Claire attended the Banff Jazz & Creative Music Workshop in 2017 where she met and studied with several renowned musicians including Vijay Iyer, Linda Oh, Tyshawn Sorey, Jen Shyu, and Stephan Crump. In 2020, Claire received a master’s degree in jazz performance and composition at McGill University. In recent years, Claire has performed alongside musicians such as John Hollenbeck, Christine Jensen, Linda Oh, Jean-Michel Pilc, Okkyung Lee, P.J. Perry, Anna Webber, and Matt Mitchell.

Claire Devlin was generously supported by the Banff Centre Artists' Awards.
 

Originally from Saint-Maurice, QC, David Lemyre discovered his passion for music at a young age and started playing guitar at the age of 13. His musical roots in blues, country, and rock genres have shaped his guitar-oriented sound, which he integrates into jazz and pop contexts.

David pursued jazz studies at Cégep de Trois-Rivières and Université de Montréal. Now based in Montreal, David is deeply involved in multiple musical projects. He is a member of bands Pourpre, Plastic Waste Band, Will Régnier Quartet, Les Hilares and artists Amonte Noble and Segöya. In addition to his band roles, David works as a substitute guitarist and freelancer, contributing his musical expertise to various projects.

David Lemyre was generously supported by the Banff Centre Artists' Awards.

Olivia W-B is a composer, improviser, guitarist, and vocalist based out of Boston, MA.  Their work spans from their self-taught background in experimental rock and noise scenes to more recent studies in composition, playing with the tension between the  underground versus the formal, the personal versus the political, and pleasure versus pain. Current projects include noise-punk band Rong, ensemble Premium Velvet Headache Pillow, chamber groups, solo guitar, and several yet-to-be-named new bands.

In April 2024 they were awarded a Mass Cultural Council Grant for Creative Individuals which will fund a suite of chamber compositions to be recorded this coming winter. They were recently commissioned to be the inaugural composer for Subject to Change: New Works for Violin Duo, a project of the Magari Ensemble, and their piece Ghost Weight was premiered at San Francisco Conservatory in February 2024. This summer their band Rong will be touring across the Midwest and Atlantic Coast, and this fall they plan to release several full-length albums through independent labels including people | places | records and Erased! Tapes. Since fall 2023 they have been studying audio engineering by assisting at New Alliance Audio in Somerville, MA.

Olivia Becker was generously supported by the Banff Centre Artists' Awards and the Robert L. Jamison Endowment.

Kevin LaFleur is a guitarist, pianist and composer based in Montreal. Interested in the ways that landforms and their organisms can guide music composition and improvisation, his practice depends on ways of observation and experimentation which are at home in natural spaces. After training as a composer and guitarist in the faculty of jazz and improvised music at McGill university, he has developed an expansive sound, gathered from his work in live electronics, free improvisation, contemporary dance, and Appalachian folk music.

Kevin is deeply interested in how art forms in and out of music can inform each other, and has a long standing project on connecting short fiction and composition. Equally at home in Jazz, folk, and pop contexts, he has worked extensively in the Montreal music scene, and maintains an ambitious schedule as a composer-performer. His first record of original music is in the works.

Kevin LaFleur was generously supported by the Banff Centre Artists' Awards and the Liz Crockford Artists Fund.

Multi-instrumentalist Kelvin Mansaray is a unique emerging voice in contemporary music. Born and raised in Nova Scotia with roots in Transylvania and Sierra Leone, Kelvin began his musical journey in community groups like the Nova Scotia Youth Orchestra and Jerry Granelli’s Creative Music Workshop. He has developed a compositional practice through self-directed study and collaboration with an intergenerational group of artists in the field of American music. Since relocating to Toronto, he has been performing and recording original music. Kelvin’s depth of practice on the violin and research into a variety of musical traditions make him a passionate and engaging performer, collaborator, and educator.

Kelvin Mansaray was generously supported by the Cyril and Elizabeth Challice Fund for Musicians.

Pianist Andrew Zhao made his concert debut at the age of 11 performing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the San Diego Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ken-David Masur. His solo appearances across the United States and Europe, in repertoire ranging from Bach to Saariaho, include performances at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Los Angeles, Carnegie Hall in New York City, Harris Concert Hall at the Aspen Music Festival, and the Borromeo Music Festival in Switzerland. As a chamber musician, Andrew is a founding member of the London-based Trio Thalassa, which won the Royal Academy of Music’s Historical Women Composers Prize for their performance of Rebecca Clarke’s Piano Trio.

Andrew is currently a masters student at the Royal Academy of Music, where he studies with Rustem Hayroudinoff. He graduated with a B.A. in music and public policy analysis from Pomona College in southern California, where he studied with Genevieve Feiwen Lee. In his hometown of San Diego, California, Andrew studied with Inessa Litvin, and is grateful to Mrs. Litvin for establishing his musical foundations and love for piano playing. He has participated in masterclasses with Robert McDonald, Dang Thai Son, and Jean-Yves Thibaudet.

Jonathan Kawchuk is a Canadian composer and sound artist, notably having scored Before the Ice (2024) and episodes of David Suzuki's The Nature of Things. His work spans theatre, film, and sound installations and he has worked on albums for Nico Muhly and Ben Frost, and studied field recording under Chris Watson. An alumnus of several music residencies, he is a Grammy voting member, recording artist on Paper Bag Records, and the Canadian representative for acoustic conservation non-profit Quiet Parks International.

Kawchuk’s most recent record Everywhen was created by playing back vocal recordings deep in the Canadian Rockies, allowing them to reverberate, and then re-recording the result in multichannel surround sound after they had gathered the forest’s characteristic echo. His next album will explore the paleoecology of Alberta/BC using instruments built from living fossil wood species, extended vocal techniques, and concatenative synthesis.

Jonathan Kawchuk was generously supported by the Alice and Betty Schultz Scholarships Endowment Fund for Dance and Music.

Hiromu Seifert is a Berlin-based Japanese-German jazz drummer, composer and music producer seeking the communication of “effortless, direct & healing truth” through his creation and making of music. He finds his artistic home in both classical concert halls as well as jazz clubs and often works in the intersection of groove-based music, contemporary classical and jazz & improvised contexts. 

Hiromu has performed concerts across Europe, UK and Asia at festivals like the Beethovenfest Bonn, Berliner Festspiele, Umbria Jazz, Goethe-Institut and clubs like Band On the Wall, Gretchen Club etc. and endorses CANOPUS drums. 

As part of the dynamic and innovative Berlin music scene, he had the opportunity to work with diverse artists such as: Manos Tsangaris, Robyn Schulkowsky, Noam Sivan, Vincent Ott, electronic musicians like Andi Toma (Mouse on Mars), pop star Hani Mojtahedi, jazz greats like Nils Landgren, Greg Cohen, John Hollenbeck, Wanja Slavin, Chicago House legend Robert Owens, as well as ensembles like the improvising orchestra Stegreif Orchestra or members of the Bremen Philharmonic. 

Hiromu’s compositions have been performed at venues such as Laieszhalle Hamburg, Konzerthaus Berlin, Neuköllner Oper, enjoy jazz, Berliner Festspiele, Martin-Gropius Bau as well as for the annual Christmas Party of the German president.

Hiromu Seifert was generously supported by the Banff Centre Artists' Awards and the OK Gift Shop Endowment.

A Dominican-American improviser, pianist and composer from Chicago, Julián´s journey started with the Caribbean rhythms of their childhood. A classically trained artist, their work found a home in jazz performance, improvisation, and collaboration. Julián is a recent Jazz Performance graduate of the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University, where they studied with Warren Wolf as a recipient of the Merit School of Music's Alice S. Pfaelzer Tuition-Free Conservatory Blue Ribbon Scholarship. As a solo pianist they have studied at the Aspen Music Festival, Gijón Piano Festival, Brevard Music Festival and Colburn Piano Festival.  As a founding member of the Peabody Improvisers Collective, Julián developed experimental collaborative programs and has been creating and performing improvisational music for ballet, modern and West-African dance programs in Baltimore as an accompanist at Peabody, and in Chicago as an accompanist at Ruth Page and Visceral Dance Centers.  

Julián is the Director of the Julián and Friends Concert Series, a monthly composer platform highlighting new music stemming from the many traditions of Black American Music now in its third year at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago; and is the founder of Mamey, a musical group and project that delves into the influence that Caribbean arts have had in their musical creative journey, and honors beautiful Dominico-Haitian traditions and cultural resilience, while promoting new and vibrant art. Julián is a member of the piano faculty at The Music Offering in Evanston, Illinois, and just released the single Rothko; Tlaloc and Totec featuring Levi Lu and Lorin Benedict, on the New York artist label Carrier Records. They are one of five Chicago artists recently chosen to participate in the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Event’s Center for Creative Entrepreneurship 2024 Cohort, to cultivate and advance their professional practice, and is the recipient of a South Arts Jazz Tour Grant for their Spring Mamey tour of the East Coast. 

Julián Pujols Quall was generously supported by Banff Centre Artists' Awards and the George Brough Memorial Endowment.

Sam Fournier is a Métis multi-instrumentalist, singer/songwriter, composer, performer and arranger based in Winnipeg. As a bassist, Fournier has performed throughout the province and Canada with a wide variety of groups, and holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Manitoba Jazz Studies program. While he is known as a versatile sideman, Sam is also developing a personal sound as a solo artist. Through his rich exposure to varying types of music, as well as having abilities on many instruments, Sam hopes to express himself and connect with others through his music. As a composer, Fournier has a deep understanding of harmony, all while delivering melodies that are simple, yet memorable. He explores elements of grief, love, hope, and community through his work. Sam believes that music should be accessible to all, regardless of education or economic status, with the goal of decolonizing the art form while maintaining his personal artistic voice.

Sam Fournier was generously supported by the Banff Centre Artists' Awards.