March 14-16 2025
Naomi Mccarroll-Butler + Jelly Ear + Friesen/Hume/Waters
Concert and Workshops
Co-presented with Tadpole
Concert Saturday, March 15th
7PM, Doors 6:30PM
Theatre 1308
1308 Edmonton trail
Workshops
Friday, March 14th: 6:30-8:30PM
Naomi McCarroll-Butler Improvisation Workshop P.1
Saturday, March 15th: 1:30-3:30PM
Jelly Ear Improvisation Workshop
Sunday, March 16th: 1:30-3:30PM
Naomi McCarroll-Butler Improvisation Workshop P.2
All Workshops at The Alcove Centre for the Arts
244 7 Ave SW
For this third show we’ve teamed up with local curatorial collective Tadpole to offer a weekend of East-West Canadian creative music exchange, featuring workshops and performances from Montréal’s Naomi McCarroll-Butler and Toronto’s Jelly Ear ensemble, as well as local Calgary Experimental collective Friesen/Hume/Waters.
Emblematic of many musicians coming out of Toronto and Montréal’s voraciously cross-pollinating musical hotbeds, Montréal’s Naomi McCarroll-Butler and the musicians of Toronto’s Jelly Ear - Cory Harper-Latkovich, Yang Chen, and Sara Constant - work across multiple genres and traditions, including free jazz, comprovisation, modal systems, notated classical music, and more. McCarroll-Butler improvises on winds, creates tuning systems, and builds her own sculptural musical instruments. Jelly Ear creates a-historical improvised musical experiences based on medieval and renaissance scores. Each of its members also create variously as composers and performers with robust individual and collaborative practices.
Not only are McCarroll-Butler and Jelly Ear intensely active as musical creators, they are also active in grassroots cultural production through activities that include community organizing, teaching, self-producing and producing for others, curating series, mentoring, and many other creative expressions. Through years of fertile musical relationship-building, collective creation, and practices of rigorous individual musicianship, each of them offers unique and de-hierarchicalized approaches to musical value, thoroughly rooted in values of curiosity, experimentation, and collaboration.
We recognize a similarity of ethos between these musicians and many in the Calgary community, which is steeped in histories of collective DIY production. For this concert lineup our co-curators at Tadpole have selected local ‘free jazz ambient noise rock’ collective Friesen/Hume/Waters to start off the night.
We’re excited to generate what we envision will be a fruitful exchange between Eastern Canadian and Calgarian creative musical cultures.
About the Workshops
Naomi McCarroll-Butler Improvisation Workshop P.1 & P.2
Friday, March 14th, 6:30-8:30PM @ The Alcove
Sunday, March 16th, 1:30-3:30PM @ The Alcove
Conduction is a method of guided group improvisation that uses hand signals and basic musical elements to provide a level playing field for musicians of different traditions and levels to create together. Aimed at anyone interested in exploring collective music-making, this will be a community space for people with different artistic interests and backgrounds to meet, speak and create. Some homemade instruments and soundmaking objects will be provided onsite. If you play an instrument, bring it! Come to one or both workshops. Improvisation, by its nature, is a living practice; different groups of people bring out different directions each time.
Medieval Horizons of Now, an improvisation workshop with Jelly Ear
Saturday, March 15th, 1:30-3:30PM
Jelly Ear is a group that explores contemporaneity within medieval music and experimental improvisation. We draw from historically informed performance practices but do not strictly align ourselves with the early-music movement. We also seek to move beyond mere historical reference or nostalgia. The contemporary is not a line that separates the past from the future, but rather a plateau containing multiple pasts and possible futures. Jelly Ear approaches medieval music as a way to expand the horizons of this plateau, and form a more radical understanding of "now."
Within this workshop, we will look at several examples of medieval music. This music will be briefly situated historically, with a short discussion around why and how this music was preserved and contemporary ideas of historically informed performance. We will then explore ways individual participants' musical backgrounds may interface with these historical pieces. Finally, we will do a few group improvisations, exploring ways of navigating this music in a supportive but free setting.
Participants can be of any background but ideally should be able to read music or have the ability to pick up simple melodic material by ear. Percussionists from any background are welcome.
Naomi McCarroll-ButleR
Naomi McCarroll-Butler is a woodwind player and instrument maker based in Montreal. She is interested in drone, sublimation in sound, alternate tuning systems, and the body horror and ecstasy of trans embodiment. Over the last four years she has developed a number of percussion, string and wind instruments based on the tunings of folk overtone flutes from northern and eastern Europe. An active collaborator, Naomi plays with Jeremy Dutcher, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, The Queer Songbook Orchestra, Pinksnail, Colin Fisher, Liberté-Anne Lymberiou, Germaine Liu, Juliet Palmer, Labyrinth Ensemble, Karen Ng, Chik White and many others. Her teachers include Jen Shyu, Pat Labarbera, Matana Roberts, Amir ElSaffar and the vibrant Tranzac community of Toronto. Her work as a composer and improviser has been featured by TONE Fest, the Canadian Music Centre, POP Montréal, Women From Space Festival, The Music Gallery, and the Guelph Jazz Festival and The Toronto Jazz Festival. She is a member of the 2023 cohort of Mutual Mentorship for Musicians, where she created an audio-visual piece with New York-based keyboardist Shoko Nagai.
“In her musical practice, McCarroll-Butler has a penchant for using drones, for using repetitive rhythmic and melodic motives and for paying special attention to timbre. Her music has a way of inviting the listener to hear in a deep, nuanced way, as initial melodic statements repeat, shift and reconstitute themselves; just as one develops an expectation as to what will come next, that expectation is subverted in surprising, compelling ways.”
Colin Story, Wholenote, June 2022
“Naomi spreads her music throughout Toronto's field of creative music, expressing herself powerfully on multiple instruments. She pairs a commitment to blues-drenched jazz vocabularies with an experimentalist's ear for new timbres and textures, often incorporating electronics. Her solo music can delve equally into sequences of focussed repetition and dreamy melodic invention, whether on the alto saxophone, flute, bass clarinet…”
Scott Thomson, Guelph Jazz Festival
photo credit: Willa Coward
Jelly Ear
Jelly Ear is a creatively open early-music music group based in Toronto. Playing the rebec, a medieval fiddle, bandleader Cory Harper-Latkovich is joined by a rotating cast of Toronto’s creative musicians. Each iteration of the band offers new interpretations of music from medieval Europe, including 11th-century mystic motets, 12th-century secular love songs, meandering 13th-century polyphony, and the knotty cryptic experimentation of the 14th-century. Decidedly anti-historic, Jelly Ear instead respects this music as a living art form, using playful improvisational explorations to collapse time and affirm the inventive humanity of composers and performers regardless of which century they may hail.
For this concert Jelly Ear will feature:
Cory Harper-Latkovich - rebec
Yang Chen - percussion
Sara Constant - flutes
Cory Harper-Latkovich
Cory Harper-Latkovich is a cellist who balances his musical life between experimental musics of many genres. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Cory moved to Toronto in 2007, where he studied composition, improvisation, and performance at York University. There he formed Clarinet Panic, a band described as “scrappy chamber rock.” Infusing minimalism, free jazz, and noise music, Clarinet Panic became Cory’s main platform for composition for several years. The band played frequently in Toronto, toured Canada and the United States, and was featured in the Toronto Music Gallery Emergents series in 2015.
Clarinet Panic disbanded in 2015 and subsequently, Cory has worked to diversify his practice. He has participated as a composition fellow in many contemporary music programs, such as the Array Music Young Composer Workshop, Toronto Creative Music Lab, Montreal Contemporary, and the Neif-Norf Summer Festival. He has been invited/commissioned to work with ensembles in Canada, the USA, and the UK. As well as developing a compositional practice within contemporary chamber music, Cory has an active solo practice involving cello, film, photography, and text.
Cory’s current composition plays with delicate densities, quiet noise, and fragile tones that carefully dismantle semiotic melodic structures and encourages careful listening and performer vulnerability.
Yang Chen
Yang Chen is a percussionist with many side-hustles who prioritizes collaboration, personal growth, and joy. Yang is a grateful nexus of playful curiosity, cross disciplinary yearning, classical training, and loving relationships. All of which influence process & product within their work.
Recent fruits of their labour include 🍊
longing for _ : their debut percussion+ album released in November 2022
Tiger Balme : their band’s self titled debut album release
leaving their arts admin job in early 2023 to pursue freelance music full time (yikes! but also wahoo!)
Lunchbox Dilemma : they were the subject of this CBC Gem docu-series featuring Asian-Canadians and their coming of age experiences
continuing to dream boundlessly, hope with discipline, grow into their most authentic self, seek & create joy, and movemovemove relentlessly despite significant & mundane difficulties and societally imposed & self imposed limiting assumptions
Yang is a soft-hearted dream-headed Pisces who enjoys yelling, cooking, and giggling at dad-jokes, often all at once.
Sara Constant
Sara Constant is a musician and artist working in various forms of contemporary/experimental music and sound.
Sara’s practice is grounded in music and listening as forms of research, embodiment, and place/space-making. Trained as a flute player and active as a soloist, improviser, and ensemble musician, Sara has performed at festivals/series in Canada (Music Gallery, Innovations en concert, CMC Presents, Women From Space), Europe (Fylkingen, Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, Fondation Royaumont, Klangspuren Schwaz), and the United States (Oh My Ears, SPLICE, Cornell University).
Among others, Sara has played with Paris-based contemporary music septet Semblance, graphic score project re:frame, medieval/improvised band Jelly Ear, FAWN chamber creative, the Canadian Composers Orchestra, and alokori, an experimental music and performance art project with Montreal-based guitarist An Laurence.
As an artist, Sara’s current projects include collaborations with composers on new works, improvisations with instruments and electronics, installation work with loudspeakers, and curation work aimed at building community spaces for interdisciplinary music-making.
Sara holds degrees from the University of Toronto (flute), University of Amsterdam (musicology), and Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg (contemporary performance). From 2018-2020, Sara participated in CoPeCo, a program in experimental music co-hosted in Tallinn, Stockholm, Lyon, and Hamburg, where their projects included the development of new music for amplified flute/electronics and tours to Finland and Italy playing improvised music. From 2016-2019, Sara co-organized the Toronto Creative Music Lab (TCML)—a community-oriented summer workshop for early-career composers, performers, and ensembles working in contemporary music.
Sara is currently based in Tkaronto/Toronto, where they work as a flutist, writer (Musicworks), and curator (Music Gallery).
photo by Yannick Anton.
Friesen/Hume/Waters
This trio of musicians from Calgary (guitarist Devin Friesen, drummer/percussionist Andrew Hume, and saxophonist Nate Waters) was borne of two longstanding duos: the textural, ambient-via-free jazz explorations of Friesen/Waters, and the blistering noise-rock freefalls of Friesen/Hume. Why not put it all together? Where does all of that meet?
The trio’s first recording “Nightspeak” released in 2024, a dynamic set of “noise rock meets post-ECM ambient free jazz” which appeared nationwide across experimental and/or jazz (depending on how the music director in that town felt about it) charts throughout the year. Reviews noted a sound “on the borderlands of post-rock and free improvisation,” drawing comparisons to late-era Talk Talk and certain 70s ECM releases (e.g. Rypdal/Vitous/DeJohnette), as well as spikier, noisier fare — “an appealing yet unlikely juxtaposition of disparate or even opposing elements,” a new ‘edition of contemporary music’ with feet jaggedly balanced between ‘academic’ and ‘dropout’.
Devin Friesen is a guitarist, sound & visual artist, as well as proprietor of the Shaking Box label. He performs and records “serenity distortion” music under the name Bitter Fictions, a long running guitar-centric practice utilizing alternate tunings, preparations, electronics, and 4-track cassette basement studio arrangements. “Serenity distortion” is intended to suggest a disruption of calm, yet also an expressively calming noise — an expressive and distinct style which soothes and cuts at the same time: the sounds of crumbling edges, fraying of surfaces, a craggy precipice between industrial collapse and a quiet world ready to replace it.
Andrew Hume is a drummer/percussionist and synth/electronics musician who also performs with Burro, Calgary’s greatest free improvised rock trio since 2011. Hume has performed with many bands, including-but-not-limited-to: the noise-freak duo Seizure Salad, the gruff alt-country Cold Water, the fractured indie rock of Extra Happy Ghost, the electronic swamp of their solo project Pale Lobo, and (along with Friesen) the proggy post-punk of Ashley Soft.
Nate Waters is a saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist who has performed and recorded in a number of disparate musical iterations. He fronts local strange-pop combo Eye of Newt, leads a jazz quartet under his own name, plays guitar in Temps, and has lent his talents to innumerable recording sessions. He has contributed to the city's musical fringe as half of the freely improvised Friesen/Waters Duo and as a part of the minimalist quartet Nobody Say Anything. He has appeared in more classical and contemporary contexts with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, Alberta Winds, Timepoint Ensemble and the Calgary Chinese Orchestra. He has also featured prominently in pop groups such as The Cable-Knits, Hunter-Gatherer and Samantha Savage Smith.