INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATIONS

A 12-year festival in partnership with Estrada Poznanska that presented a dozen Chicago jazz artists configured in different groupings in diverse musical contexts. It grew to include workshops and residencies for high school and university students from across Poland and an annual Chicago-Poznan Exchange project that featured commissioned collaborative performances. Poznan’s jazz musicians claimed the festival as the central force in building a jazz community in Poznan where there had not been one before.

A pandemic-inspired program that utilizes the limitless opportunities afforded by digital conferencing by inviting students from four different Latin American countries and from across the United States to attend workshops on improvisation led by top-level Latin Jazz artists along with Chicago Jazz Philharmonic’s Jazz Academy students.

Crepuscule is a multi-arts discipline community-driven program that I began presenting in Chicago in from 2002-2006. It traveled to France in 2004 to a festival called Banlieues Bleues, an annual jazz festival which started in 1984 and has developed in seventeen towns in the county of Seine-Saint-Denis, on the edge of Paris. Unlike the US, the suburbs of Paris are comprised of struggling immigrant communities who have little access to the arts. Students of music, circus, martial and visual arts workshopped with musicians from Chicago and culminated in an interactive performance