![Third Place [MusicFest]](http://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e24c45640284709657004a2/3a66f5aa-e2c0-4c58-b29b-bf241730f2e5/2026+Logo%2C+for+printing+sticker.jpg?format=1500w)
2025 Guest Curators
-
Amy K Bormet is a pianist, vocalist, and composer, known for her dedication to creating new music. Bormet's performances channel her deep musical knowledge and fearless experimentation, seamlessly fusing elements of jazz, singer-songwriter, and the avant-garde, leading her to stages on national and international festivals. Her compositions have been performed by ensembles of all sizes, from voice and bassoon duos, to the National Symphony Orchestra. In 2011, to foster creative community spaces – by, and for, women and non-binary musicians, Amy K Bormet created the Washington Women in Jazz Festival. She directs, finances, and performs with Washington Women In Jazz to celebrate the women and non-binary artists of DC’s renowned improvisational music communities. Now in its 15th year, she has collaborated with Fay Victor, Mary Halvorson, Allison Miller, and more than 75 women and non-binary musicians from around the globe.
-
Corey Smith is a composer, writer, and performer from Chicago, Illinois. Their work drifts between disciplines, exploring critical regionalism, sensuality in performance, and queer sonic ecologies. Sometimes, their performance and sound work appears in more traditional venues—Steppenwolf Theater, Hyde Park Art Center, the Mattress Factory. Other times, in more unexpected places: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Emil Bach House, a prairie at dawn, or international festivals like Rotterdam Film Festival and Bath Fringe. They’ve held residencies at High Concept Labs, Light Box Detroit, the Iowa Lakeside Lab, the Tallgrass Prairire National Preserve, Grin City, and the University of Illinois Springfield. Their work has been featured by Hyperallergic, Architectural Digest, and the Chicago Reader. Smith is a proud midwesterner, collaborator, and friend. They teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
2024 Guest Curators
-
Recognized for her "vocal brilliance" (City Pleasures) and "absolutely thrilling" voice (Around the Town Chicago), Metro Detroit-based soprano, Jocelyn (Zelasko) Conselva, is a versatile musician who is celebrated as an insightful performer with a captivating stage presence. She has “shaken the halls with sublime ecstatic vocals” (I Care if You Listen) performing chamber music, opera, and art song in festivals and concerts throughout Europe, the Caribbean, and North America. Jocelyn is the vocalist for Detroit's premiere ensemble, New Music Detroit (NMD) and frequently performs with Picosa, EcoSono, and Grammy-award winning ensemble Eighth Blackbird. As an advocate for the creation of new works, she has commissioned 20+ composers including Angélica Negrón, Marcus Elliot, Vid Smooke, Michelle McQuade Dewhirst, and Jorge Sosa. Jocelyn continues to maintain a private voice studio and is also the Development Director for ArtOps servicing the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival and Detroit Chamber Winds & Strings. When not creating, you can find her golfing or squishing her kittens while completing NYT crossword puzzles.
-
Jared Talaga is a disabled artist practicing and creating primarily through live experimental music performance, musical composition, and tape music releases.
His primary focus for the past three years has been live performance and studio recordings based around the Electric Piano and self built Buchla Modular Synthesizers. His discipline focuses on curating music experiences that add accessibility into the physical spaces they occupy. As a wheelchair user for 17 years, his journey with music has been as much about creating spaces for myself and other disabled artists / under represented artists to share their work.
2023 Guest Curators
-
The Bass speaks in the hands of award-winning artist Marion Hayden. Mentored by master trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, Hayden began performing jazz at the age of 15. She has performed with such diverse luminaries as Bobby McFerrin, Nancy Wilson, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Geri Allen, Regina Carter, Steve Turre, Lester Bowie, David Allen Grier, James Carter, Dorothy Donegan, Frank Foster, Jon Hendricks, Hank Jones, Bobby Hutcherson, Larry Willis, Sheila Jordan, Mulgrew Miller, Carole Bufford and many others.
Her creative practice centers around her ensemble Legacy– formed in 2003. Legacy performs original, narrative driven compositional works within the framework of jazz and improvised music. The ensemble also specializes in preserving and expanding the legacy of musicians from her hometown of Detroit, MI. She is a founding member of the Jazz Education Network’s Sisters in Jazz program and a co- founder of the Grammy nominated ensemble Straight Ahead- the first all-woman jazz ensemble signed to Atlantic Records.
In recognition of her artistic creativity and originality, Hayden was honored with the Kresge Artist Fellowship, a fellowship and grant award of unrestricted funds to support the fellows’ creative practice. She is a recipient of a U.S. Congressional Commendation, the Jazz Hero Award from the Jazz Journalists Association and the Vision in Excellence Award from the National Conference of Artists.
As an arts advocate, Hayden has served as panelist or consultant for numerous national and statewide arts organizations including Jazz Education Network, Chamber Music America, the McKnight Foundation, Arts Midwest, South Arts, the Detroit Council for the Arts, Michigan Council for the Arts, Detroit Historical Museum, and the Charles Wright Museum of African American History.
Hayden is a Lecturer in the Dept. of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation at University of Michigan and Director of Jazz Bass and Jazz Ensembles at Oakland University. A passionate advocate for community youth music education, Hayden holds youth education positions at Michigan State University, Centrum and the Detroit Jazz Festival. As well, she conducts the Next Gen Ensemble- a performing group showcasing emerging musicians.
-
Maritza Garibay is a musician and music educator from Detroit, Michigan, and a recipient of the 2022 New Music USA Creator Development Fund for her first opera, Cleansed. A violinist and orchestral conductor, she has shifted her focus toward experimental sonic explorations with homemade analog synthesizers and effects. She performs these instruments in her abrasive ambient duo, Dominant Hand. Her current graduate work reflects on the diaspora of Pauline Oliveros’s deep listening pedagogy in the BIPOC sound art community.
2022 Guest Curators
-
Michael Malis is a composer, pianist, and music educator based in Detroit, Michigan. A multi-faceted musical artist, he works across genres in improvisational, concert music, and interdisciplinary settings. His 2022 release From Darkness We Awaken, featuring chamber-improvising ensemble Virago was released on Brisbane Australia-based MADE NOW MUSIC and called “transfixing” with a “disarming intensity” (All About Jazz). His duo project with saxophonist Marcus Elliot, Balance, has been praised as “contemporary jazz of the highest order, a benchmark for where the genre can go” (Detroit Metro Times.)
As a composer, Malis has been commissioned by Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings, Chamber Music Society of Detroit, Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Detroit Composers’ Project, Virago, Hole in the Floor, and others. As a pianist, he has shared the stage with such luminaries as Marcus Belgrave, Gerald Cleaver, Jaribu Shahid, John Lindberg, William Hooker, A. Spencer Barefield, Tyshawn Sorey, Brandee Younger, J.D. Allen, and Marion Hayden.
-
Live electronics, amplified cactus, and a ton of drums comprise the auditory arsenal of Detroit Bureau of Sound aka ZacDBS. A fondness of everything loud developed at a young age and led DBS through boom/crash classical percussion study into the realm of big PA systems blaring analog synthesizers in dark rooms. DBS's musical persuasion comes from unorthodox techniques of experimental composers from the past hundred years - Iannis Xenakis, Wendy Carlos, John Cage, and ultimately the futuristic dance music from Detroit known as techno.
DBS is fundamentally inspired by our relationship with sound as a species; that since the dawn of humankind, rhythm and pitch have been tools of communication, morphing into language over time, then into "ear art" beyond the bounds of spoken expression. With a mess of modular synthesizers and some fun sonic party tricks, DBS's music enables deep listening environments for controlling mind, body, and energy.