An Evening with the Natalie Brett Quartet | Live Concert
Fri Jan 6, 2023 | 6 PM
Image: Courtesy of the Artist
Start off the first weekend of the new year with an evening jazz concert featuring the Natalie Brett Quartet. This concert will also be the perfect send off for Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment, entering its final days. The exhibition will be closing on Sunday January 8, 2022.
The Natalie Brett Quartet plays jazz standards with a free improvisation toolkit. Their inventive and playful approach to deconstructing, reconstructing, and recombining the lyrical, melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic content of some classic tunes yields fascinating and always musical results. The Natalie Brett quartet is vocalist Carol Sawyer, pianist Lisa Cay Miller, drummer Kenton Loewen, and Clyde Reed on bass. Clyde is unable to join them for this concert, but bassist James Meger will be sitting in.
The Natalie Brett Quartet celebrated the launch of their first, eponymously titled, LP on December 9th, 2022 with a concert at 8EAST. The limited edition LP is available in the Gallery Store and online at the quartet’s band camp page. Available while quantities last.
Drinks will be served at a no-host bar before and after the performance. Enjoy an evening of art and live music with us and your fellow art-lovers.
An Evening with the Natalie Brett Quartet
JANUARY 6, 2022 starting at 6 PM
WHERE: Coutroom 302 in the Gallery Annex
TICKETS: $10 Members | $15 Non-Members
About the Musicians
Carol Sawyer (she/her) is a visual artist and singer working with photography, installation, video, and improvised music. Since the early 1990’s her visual art work has investigated the connections between photography and fiction, performance, memory, and history. Her ongoing and expansive project, the Natalie Brettschneider Archive, has been exhibited extensively across Canada, including at the Vancouver Art Gallery, in 2017. The Natalie Brett Quartet is directly inspired by this visual art project.
Sawyer earned an Honours diploma in photography from ECUAD, and a Masters in interdisciplinary arts from SFU, where she studied acting, music performance, critical theory, and music composition. As a young woman, Sawyer studied classical singing, focusing on opera and art song, before training in extended voice with Richard Armstrong. She has released three CDs with her improvising ensemble ion Zoo, and collaborated and recorded with American composer and trombonist Michael Vlatkovich.
Lisa Cay Miller (she/her) is presently living on the unceded Territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam peoples. She is an improvising pianist and composer who loves to create in the moment. Dr. Lisa Cay is the Artistic Director of the NOW Society and performs with and composes for many great musicians from Vancouver and around the world.
Juno award winner Kenton Loewen is an accomplished drummer and singer/ songwriter from Vancouver British Columbia. Alumni of VCC, his scope of work embodies experimental, modern, post bop and free jazz, folk, country, punk, hip Hop, Arabic, Persian, African and rock music. As a leader and sideman, Loewen has recorded and toured extensively in Canada, The U.S., Mexico, Europe and Australia. Kenton Loewen has worked extensively with local and international free experimental players and was an original member of both Dan Mangan + Blacksmith and Mother Mother.
James Meger is a Vancouver-based bassist and composer working primarily in the fields of jazz, free improvisation and rock. As a performer, his work has been showcased through national and international tours and through recording projects and concerts alongside artists including Kenny Wollesen, Chris Speed, Kris Davis, Wayne Horvitz, Lori Freedman, Ig Henneman, Darius Jones, Peggy Lee and Tony Wilson, among others. James is also active as a sideman and co-leader in various ongoing projects, including: Peggy Lee’s Echo Painting, Sick Boss, The Bruno Hubert Trio, Ten Thousand Wolves, The Now Society Ensemble, I Think I Saw You See Me, The Sumner Brothers, Josh Zubot’s Strings, Tony Wilson’s Burn Down The Cornfield and Elisa Thorn’s HUE, among others.