2026 Simplified Schedule – Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium
DAY 1 (1:00 pm to 11:00 pm)
1:00–1:10 pm – Opening Remarks
Eric Fillion
1:10–1:40 pm – On the Exhibit XRoads
Lufuki
1:45–2:30 pm – The Improvising Archive: Reanimating Sonic Memories
Jesse Stewart
2:35–3:05 pm – A Radio Active Community: Remixing Storytelling
David Dacks and Sydney Dacks
3:05–3:20 pm – Coffee Break
3:20–4:35 pm – Archiving the Scene: Jazz Musicians and the Making of Community Memory
Keisha Bell, “Archie Alleyne Archives: Remembering Black Musicians in Toronto between 1940-1960”; Brandon Hocura, “Adaptogenic Rhythms: Milford Graves, Self-Reliant Community Building, and His Archive of Heartbeats”; Brian Edward Jones, “Paul Motian, Armenian American: Improvising in the Space Between Black and White”; and Miles B. Jordan, “On the Road, On the Record: Touring, Family Memory, and the Living Archive of a New Orleans Musician”
4:40–5:30 pm – Statesman of the Piano: The Music of Lou Hooper
Sean Mills, Eric Fillion, and Désirée Rochat
With piano performance by (TBC)
5:30–7:15 pm – Dinner
7:15–9:15 pm – Big Ideas in Improvisation
Ahmed Abdullah and Monique Ngozi Nri
9:30–11:00 pm – Film Screening
Sun Ra: Do the Impossible (Christine Turner, 2026)
DAY 2 (8:30 am to 4:00 pm)
8:30–9:00 am – Coffee and Refreshments
9:00–9:50 am – Workshops (Parallel Sessions)
Lara Hill, “Seeing Like an Improviser: Building a Living Archive”
Mike Hansen, “Disruptor, the Archive as a Constructed Fiction Through the Act of Co-Authorship”
9:55–11:05 am – Secret Lives of Colour: A Conversation
Myra Melford, François Houle, Joëlle Léandre, Gerry Hemingway, and Gordon Grdina
11:10–Noon – Improvising the Archive/Archiving the Improvisatory: Medea Electronique and the Archive in the Post-Digital Age
Eric Lewis
Noon–1:00 pm – Lunch
1:00–1:45 pm – Artist Communities and the Living Archive
Michael Palumbo, “Before, During, and After: Documenting Improvised Music through the Exit Points Catalogue”; as well as Curtis Sassur and Simon Rogers, “Own Your Own Sound: Imagining a DIY Post-Custodial Archival Network”
1:50–3:10 pm – Resonant Bodies, Living Memory
Megan Harton, “On The Being & Breaking of Silence”; kat estacio, “Resonant Inter-Remembering”; Monika Herzig, “Transparent – Building Archives of Embodied Knowledge and Social Reflection”; and Kathryn Ladano, “Anatomy of the Recovering Brain: Performance as Living Archive and Embodied Memory”
3:15–3:50 pm – We Are Archives
Georgia Simms and Heather Cornell
3:50–4:00 pm – Remarks
Eric Fillion
4:00–6:00 pm – Colloquium and Festival Reception
Hosted at Brothers Brewing Company (5 Wyndham St. N., Unit A, Downtown Guelph)
