Halifax’s high-school orchestra under the direction of Nathan Beeler has a history of ambitious arrangements and collaborations, prioritizing a broad and exploratory education of young musicians. Upstream has paired award-winning jazz and Persian music composer Behrooz Mihankhah with these young artists in creating a new work exploring Middle Eastern rhythmic vocabulary and approaches to improvisation in the context of the Western orchestra. The orchestra will additionally feature recent works by young Halifax composers.

Behrooz Mihankhah is an Iranian Canadian, ECMA-nominated composer, and pianist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Inspired by his migrations through Iran, India and finally to Canada, Behrooz fuses various musical traditions, compositional techniques, and improvisational schools of thought and brings together listeners of various backgrounds. Behrooz Mihankhah’s Quartet is an ensemble of exceptionally talented composers and improvisers. With Ali Enriquez (Violin), John Janigan-Mill (Bass), and Morgan Zwicker (drums), each member of the group breathes life into Behrooz’s compositions, making them uniquely their own. Together, they create music that transcends borders, and resonates with audiences from all walks of life.

Click here for the trailer. 

NOW.HERE.THIS., Upstream Music’s first video documentary, produced and directed by award winning filmmaker Christopher Spencer-Lowe, is a streaming music performance documentary that uses chance operations and randomizing algorithms to create a new and unique experience every time it’s seen. In the spirit of aleatoric (created with random elements) music pioneer John Cage, NOW.HERE.THIS celebrates the improvisational form and philosophy of being in the moment while featuring the diverse music and ideas of six talented Nova Scotia/ Mi'kma'ki based composers: Alan Syliboy, Amy Brandon, Geordie Haley, India Gailey, Mohammad Sahraei and Samantha Wilson.

Reception for all musicians and patrons: A reception celebrating the start of another fabulous Open Waters Festival. An opportunity to meet the artists that make the Open Waters Festival the polar bear dip of the new music season.

Directed by Tim Crofts, The Creative Music Ensemble emphasizes collaborative creative process through deep listening and collective improvisation.

The group employs creative strategies including graphic scores, text scores and improvisational forms to generate, you know, music. Harry McInroy (trumpet), Jeremie Boudreau (guitar), Gabriel Galvis Rangel (viola), David Johnston (piano).

Dalhousie Composition: Directed by Amy Brandon, film music, chamber music and improvisations written and performed by Dalhousie composition students, including the Rostova Quartet.

Aliayta Foon-Dancoes (violin) Isidora Nojkovic (cello)

Hailed as “the new cross-continental duo to pay attention to” (Classical Post). Since founding their group in 2020, they have appeared at the Canadian Opera Centre, New Music Gathering, Gifts for the River Film Festival, and the Long Beach Opera Gala, and have commissioned five new works for violin and cello with generous support from the Canada Council for the Arts. Their performances have been described as packing "a mind-bending punch" (I Care if You Listen).

A concert showcasing highlights and longstanding collaborations of Quatuor Bozzini with Montreal composer/performer Nicolas Caloia, London-based Canadian superstar Cassandra Miller and former Haligonian and celebrated Inuk composer/improviser Tanya Tagaq (Sivunittinni, 2015). A brilliant new version of the Chaconne by Bach — arranged by Bozzini's close collaborator, Montreal composer Michael Oesterle — rounds up a not-to-miss concert, Quatuor Bozzini's first appearance in Halifax since 2015.

Join us for an extended version of Halifax’s ever-popular and rightfully legendary Wednesday night jazz session, now with extra jazz! You never know who might sit in…

The incredible house band featuring the great Cuban pianist Silvio Pupo, supremely versatile drummer Damien Moynihan, and brilliant jazz bassist Ron Hynes, have made their weekly session into a cornerstone of our music community for over a decade.

Symphony Nova Scotia featuring: Conductor Karl Hirzer (Vancouver). Soloists Don Ross and Sean Hall (guitar), India Gailey (cello), Ellen Gibling (harp), Symphony Nova Scotia. Performing new works by Canadian composers Vivian Fung and Zosha Di Castri, a guitar duet with orchestra by Mik’maw composer-performers Don Ross and Sean Hall, and a premiere by Upstream co-founder Jeff Reilly. Also includes a cello concerto by 2024 PCCA winner India Gailey and the “historical” work, Workers Union, by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. The world premiere of a new large-scale piece by acclaimed French-American avant-garde composer Christian Wolff, written for Quatuor Bozzini and SNS, is a highlight in the 2024 edition of Open Waters. 

The 2024 Paul Cram Creation Award recipient will be announced at the concert

“Lyrebird Hotel” is a solo performance, by experimental vocalist, composer and improviser Elizabeth Lima, mixing vocal performance, musical sound design and original texts. The show is set in an allegorical hotel, in which dwells and wanders a lyrebird; the Australian bird known as the master of mimicry. The lyrebird celebrates female artists who have been categorized as “mad, bad or sad”, breaking their isolation, travelling within ethereal environments with humour, joy, intensity and reverence.

Also known as new music composer and interdisciplinary artist Gabriel Dharmoo, drag artist Bijuriya presents a set of live vocal performance, sprinkled with playful skits and banter. Bijuriya's original songs and curated list of cover songs showcase her quirky, queer and 'art-school' outlook on her cultural intersections as Indo-Caribbean, South Asian and Québécoise.

With a blend of classical, electro, and jazz, Dr. Jordan Institute presents their new show SIREN. Using spoken word and song, soprano Nicole Jordan together with the unconventional jazz trio of Sean Fasciani (bass), and Stefan Kruger (drums) and Mark Tuinstra (guitar), weave a tale about the shape-shifting temptresses of Caribbean folklore, like Mama de l'Eau, and La Diablesse.

Exploratory improvised performance and discussion facilitated by Upstream’s Artistic Director, Lukas Pearse and featuring five OWF 2024 musicians who have never played together before. A chance to examine multiple approaches to creativity in the moment.

Questions welcome, listening required!

Canadian violinist Gillian Smith is known across Canada as an enthusiastic advocate for new music and is excited to collaborate with composers of today whenever possible. She released her first album featuring works for solo violin, Into the Stone, which features works by Kati Agócs, Alice Ping Yee Ho, Veronika Krausas, Chantale Laplante, and Ana Sokolovi´c, on the Leaf Music label in 2019. This album was nominated for the 2020 Classical Recording of the Year at the ECMA’s. “Into the Stone is a stunning debut album by a rising star”—WholeNote magazine. “Gillian Smith demonstrates a great skill and mastery and magnificently appropriates Canadian repertoire”. —La Scena Musicale

Brass Knuckle Sandwich Marilyn Lerner (piano), Nicole Rampersaud- (trumpet), is both a conversation and an exploration of a percussive, wind-swept soundscape at the intersection of copper and wood. It is the meeting of two of Canada’s finest improvisers. A friendly encounter of creative, daring, patient and generous musicians.

Intimacy is at the heart of SILVERVEST’s vibrant and melodic music, toggling between swagger and sweetness, caressing and careening. Their music remains unset and generous. The duo intuitively explores the nuts and bolts of humanity’s mortal coil while remaining open to all possibilities.

"In terms of inventive new concepts with historical roots, Montreal’s SILVERVEST– being the duo of vocalist Kim Zombik and bassist Nicolas Caloia – cooks up a sound that is savory, witty and flecked with surprising twists, with hints of Abbey Lincoln, Billie Holiday and hip-hopping post-beat poetry. Stir and enjoy." —Josef Woodard, Down Beat May 2022

Nicola Miller is a jazz and experimental saxophonist and composer based on the South Shore of Nova Scotia. Her strange tender playing is lyrical and yet stretches toward the avant-garde. She has performed frequently in both the Berlin and Canadian improvised music and jazz communities. Her project 'Living Things’ experiments with collected sounds and reflections from the natural world interpreted by local musician Nicholas D'Amato, Toronto musicians Doug Tielli and Nick Fraser and New Brunswick’s Nicole Rampersaud.

Improvisor, composer, educator and guitarist Geordie Haley will be hosting and curating an open invite improvisation session at The Propeller Taproom venue.

Janice Isabel Jackson, vocalist, improviser, new music specialist, composer.

Click here for a preview of the night.

Vocalypse presents a rare opportunity to hear Janice Isabel Jackson sing 3 compositions for soprano and tape by French computer music pioneer: Jean Claude Risset (1938 - 2016). These three works are considered hallmarks in Jean-Claude Risset’s career as a musician and researcher of acoustics, including computer simulations of musical instruments and new sonic worlds. The works are a sensual feast of organic, mellifluous, and other-worldly sounds.

Janice Jackson has sung over 240 world premieres, many works written specifically for her, and performed with contemporary music ensembles and in modern music festivals and concert halls around the world. In practicing her craft, Jackson has worked extensively as an improviser, and mastered a wide range of extended vocal techniques. She is the artistic director of Vocalypse Productions which, since 2006 has presented over 40 productions of new vocal music and opera. 

Gilhespy & Crofts is a new improvising duo based out of Halifax. Meghan Gilhespy (voice) and Tim Crofts (piano) traverse through texture, poetry, noise, extended techniques and piano preparations in a creative exploration.

Composition by Sandy Moore. Conducted by Denise Grant. Performed by Paula Rockwell (mezzo soprano), Michael Donovan (baritone), Jennifer King (piano), Sibylle Marquardt (flute), Susan Sayle (viola), and Norman Adams (cello).

Vox Humana: A new chamber work by Upstream co-founder Sandy Moore, based on the poems of E. Alex Pierce.

Poems of great passion and tenderness, as close to rapture as a writer can get and still hold on.

E. Alex Pierce’s voice can be heard echoing down the long corridors of memory and myth. It’s not that these poems live in the past; instead, they manage to bring it back to life with uncanny sensual details and an urgency that makes you realize some fires never really go out.

Vox Humana is all lilt and discipline in its courtliness, its surrender to the theatre of the moment at its most alive.

Inspired by earlier mentors such as Upstream co-founder and past Artistic Director, Paul Cram, as well as his current pursuits of both travel and always expanding his music network, James Shaw invites you to experience the premier of new compositions and reimagined pieces written by Paul Cram.

The Nonet: Chris Mitchell (Soprano, Alto Sax, and Flute), James Shaw (Tenor and Clarinet), Dawn Hatfield (Baritone Sax and Flute), Devin Wesley (Bassoon), Andrew Jackson (Trombone), Tom Richards (Trombone), Richard White (Guitar), Peter Bull (Bass), and Mark Adam (Drums).