Improvising Care Conference Day 1, Guided conversation with Wadada Leo Smith + Eric Lewis, IICSI Annual Conference
Venue: McGill University, New Music Building/Elizabeth Wirth Building, 527 Sherbrooke St. West in room Room A832-833 Directions:
Please note that these directions supersede those found here earlier. To enter the New Music Building/Elizabeth Wirth Building on Sunday, October 6, please use the entrance on Aylmer, approximately 100 meters north of Sherbrooke. There will be a Flux Festival staff person sitting inside the locked glass doors. You will need to identify yourself by name with photo ID, state that you are attending the Improvising Care Conference and sign an attendance sheet in order to be let in. Once you are in the building, take the elevator from the ground floor to 8th floor, turn right and walk towards the end of the hallway in order to access the conference space. We apologize for this rather intrusive (among other things!) procedure, which is due to McGill University deciding to drastically limit university activities and access in fear of possible protests related to the current situation in the Middle East targeting the university. We think it is important to add that no organized student groups have asked to have our events canceled, and no general boycott has been called for.
Date: Sunday, October, 6, 2024
Time: 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Cost: Free
Prof. Eric Lewis will lead a discussion with the composer, theorist, musician and bandleader Wadada Leo Smith on the implications of his music, and music in general, for practices of care.
Wadada Leo Smith is an American trumpeter and composer. He became a member of the Chicago based Association for the Advancement of Creative Music in 1967 and has recorded and performed extensively since this time.
Smith was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Ten Freedom Summers, (Defining Moments in the History of the United States of America), a collection of compositions inspired by the civil rights movement and released as a 4-CD boxed set. Smith was named DownBeat Magazine’s Composer of the Year in 2013.
In 2016 Smith received a Doris Duke Artist Award and earned an honorary doctorate from CalArts, where he was also celebrated as Faculty Emeritus. In addition, he received the Hammer Museum’s 2016 Mohn Award for Career Achievement “honoring brilliance and resilience.” In 2018 he received the Religion and The Arts Award from the American Academy of Religion. In 2019 he received the UCLA Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the University of California, Los Angeles. United States Artists named Smith a 2021 USA Fellow, and he has been selected as a 2022 Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration (RITM).
Smith has performed and/or recorded with Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, Cecil Taylor, Steve McCall, Anthony Davis, Carla Bley, Don Cherry, Jeanne Lee, Tadao Sawai, Muhal Richard Abrams, Ed Blackwell, Kazuko Shiraishi, Han Bennink, Marion Brown, Charlie Haden, Malachi Favors Magoustous, Jack DeJohnette, Vijay Iyer, Ikue Mori, Min Xiao Fen, Bill Laswell, John Zorn, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Frank Lowe, among many others.