Venue: Articule Open-Access Artist-Run Centre (6282 Rue St-Hubert, Montréal, QC H2S 2M2) Date: October 4, 2026 Time: 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
How does a personal practice become a language? How do our sound, our experiences, our encounters, and the way we listen ultimately shape music that reflects who we are? This session with Bob Stewart will take the form of a lively conversation, punctuated by playing, listening, and musical examples. Drawing on his own journey, as well as what emerges from the audience, we’ll explore sound, groove, relationships with other musicians, composition, and how each of us can give shape and meaning to our own unique practice. A leading figure on the tuba in contemporary jazz, Bob Stewart has profoundly expanded the instrument’s role. He has performed and recorded with artists such as Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, Dizzy Gillespie, McCoy Tyner, Sonny Rollins, Arthur Blythe, Lester Bowie, and Henry Threadgill, while also developing a significant career as a composer and educator.
Bob Stewart will be joined by Jazz drummer John Hollenbeck from McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. Stewart and Hollenbeck are former band mates who performed together in Tony Malaby’s Tuba Trio.
More than a class in the traditional sense, this gathering is a rare opportunity to spend time with a musician whose career has been built around a profoundly unique voice, and to engage this experience in dialogue with our own ways of playing, listening, and creating. All instrumentalists are welcome, as are composers, arrangers, sound engineers, students, and curious listeners. Attendees are encouraged to bring their instruments.