Time Changes: Improvisation, History and the Body

June 20-21, 2015, Vancouver, British Columbia

UBC Robson Campus Room C100

10am – 5pm Free

Time Changes is an academic symposium including presentations from artists, performers, scholars and community members from across the continent, with keynote talks by percussionist-composer-improvisers Gerry Hemingway and Billy Martin, who are both performing at the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

The colloquium will focus on social, cultural and artistic encounters with, and depictions of, time and the times in which we live. What does it mean to create in the moment? What are the implications of keeping time or of transgressing time? How does the human body sound its time and place? Can improvisation bring about tangible social or cultural change?

 

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Saturday, June 20^th

All presentations will take place in UBC Robson Square Room C100.

 

10:00 am

Artist Talk

PrOphecy Sun: The Body, Chance and Improvisation

 

10:45

Panel: Race, Rhythm and History

Emma Cleary, Staffordshire University

Jazz-Shaped Bodies: Mapping Space, Time, and Sound in African American Fiction

 

Barry Long, Bucknell University

Freedom Songs at the Intersection of Jazz and Journalism

 

Brian Jude de Lima, York University

Synth-copated Rhythms: Reanimating Dissonance as a Tool for Rhythmic Prolongation

 

Brent Rowan, Wilfrid Laurier University

The Impact of a Jazz Improvisation Experience on an Amateur Adult Musician’s Mind, Body and Spirit

 

12:30 pm         Catered lunch

 

1:00 pm          

Keynote

Billy Martin: Wandering

 

2:00 pm

Film Screening and Discussion

Ornette: Made in America

Moderated by David Lee, University of Guelph

 

3:30 pm

Artist Presentation

Rupert Common and the Freestyle Rap Alliance: Improvisation in Hip Hop

 

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Sunday, June 21^st

All presentations will take place in UBC Robson Square Room C100.

 

10:00 am

Artist Talk

Julia Úlehla: The Dálava Project: Meditations on (musical) evolution and (cyclic) time: activating past, present, and future through song, body memory, and improvisation

 

10:45 am

Panel: Interfaces – Contact Technologies

Kiran Bhumber and Bob Pritchard, University of British Columbia

Neelamjit Dhillon, California Institute of the Arts

 

12:00 pm

Chapbook and CD Launch

Ammons: A Sheaf of Words for Piano

Kevin McNeilly and Geoff Mitchell

 

12:30 pm      Catered lunch

 

1:00 pm               

Keynote

Gerry Hemingway: Expression in Music: A Look Inside the Personal Language of an Improviser

 

2:00 pm

Panel: Impacts and Changes

Kathe Gray, York University

All time exists in the present: Utopian moments in improvised music making

 

David Lee, University of Guelph

Improvised Music in Canada: High Modernism and the Artists Jazz Band

 

Tom Scholte, University of British Columbia

AYSYNCHRONCITY AND THE EMERGENCE OF MEANING IN THEATRICAL PERFORMANCE: Cybernetically Improvised Performance Texts and their Hermeneutic Impacts

 

3:30 pm

Artist Presentation

Ben Brown and Michelle Lui: MAM Music and Movement Improvisation

 

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TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival

For the complete Jazz Festival schedule, click here.

 

Innovation Series Concerts (featuring conference presenters)

The Ironworks Studios 235 Alexander Street

 

The Pugs and Crows (Ben Brown)                                   Friday June 19^th 9:30 pm

Destroy Vancouver (Billy Martin)                                      Friday June 19^th 11:30 pm

Samuel Blaser/ Benoit Delbecq/ Gerry Hemingway      Saturday, June 20^th 9:30 pm

Dálava (Julia Úlehla)                                                          Saturday, June 20^th 11:30 pm

Paul Plimley/ Joe Williamson/ Gerry Hemingway          Sunday, June 21^st 11:30 pm