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 will be joined by pianist Sylvie Courvoisier to perform Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens.

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.
(Photo: Jimmy Katz)
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Pianist-composer Sylvie Courvoisier, a Brooklyn-based native of Switzerland and winner of Germany’s International Jazz Piano Prize in 2022, has earned renown for balancing two distinct worlds: the deep, richly detailed chamber music of her European roots and the grooving, hook-laden sounds of the avant-jazz scene in New York City, her home for more than two decades.

 Few artists feel truly at ease in both concert halls and jazz clubs, playing improvised or composed music. But Courvoisier — “a pianist of equal parts audacity and poise,” according to The New York Times — is as compelling when performing Stravinsky’s epochal Rite of Spring in league with new-music pianist Cory Smythe as she is when improvising with her own acclaimed jazz trio, featuring bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen. 

Then there are her ear-opening collaborations with such luminaries as John Zorn, Wadada Leo Smith, Evan Parker, Ikue Mori, Ned Rothenberg, Fred Frith, Andrew Cyrille, Mark Feldman, Christian Fennesz, Nate Wooley and Mary Halvorson.
(Photo: Véronique Hoegger)
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Rehab Hazgui is a composer and sound ecologist. Her artworks explore ways to learn new forms of languages through conscious listening and the relationship that beings have with their culture, heritage, society and landscape as involved and living participants. Her research examines the ways in which sound emerges through dynamic landscapes, including those that are biological, geophysical, and human consequences. Rehab Hazgui’s primary focus is on the act of listening to itself, as it relates to our perception of space, our relationship to it, and the profound level of engagement that our ears provide with the world. In her music she is constantly exploring the endless movement of sound, repetition, and the use of silence as a third space to navigate between different forms of listening.

At the heart of her sonic research is the concept of achieving a synergetic cognitive interaction, which involves the seamless collaboration between human and machine to create an integrated and boundary-pushing musical performance. Her music is a unique and innovative experience that transcends traditional notions of music and technology, offering an unparalleled sonic journey for the listener. Her sonic creations challenge the listener’s perception of time and space, showcasing her distinct approach to sonic experimentation and exploration. Rehab Hazgui’s work has been presented in many festivals and venues: The Art Week (Singapore), Phonetics (Algiers), CTM (Berlin), Kikk (Namur, Belgium), Savvy Contemporary (Berlin), Phonetics (Saint Denis, Paris), Perte de Signal (Montreal), Sight & Sound (Montreal), The Mannheimer Sommer Festival (Mannheim, Germany); as well as countless workshops across Europe on building DIY synthesizer and audio devices.

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Co-presented with Arts in the Margins, International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, CJLO and CKUT.

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Innovations en concert would like to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, and the SOCAN Foundation for their support.