March 13-15

Naomi Mccarroll-Butler + Jelly Ear + Local Guest

Co-presented with Tadpole

Theatre 1308

1308 Edmonton trail

Saturday March 15th: Concert at 7PM (Doors 6PM)

Workshop times TBA

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 a local Calgary musical guest (TBA!!).  


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.  We’re excited to generate what we envision will be a fruitful exchange between Eastern Canadian and Calgarian creative musical cultures. 

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.