2026 Ottawa Jazz Festival — Saturday, June 27

Saturday, June 27, 2026 Lineup

Daily lineup at Confederation Park. Headliner: St. Vincent & The NAC Orchestra on OLG Main Stage.

OLG Main Stage (Confederation Park)

8:30 pm — St. Vincent & The NAC Orchestra

St. Vincent featuring The National Arts Centre Orchestra

St. Vincent has been regarded as one of the most innovative and fascinating presences in modern music for nearly 20 years, constantly reinventing her audio and visual personae over the course of a kaleidoscopic catalog and winning six GRAMMY Awards along the way.

This summer, St. Vincent will venture once more into unexplored territory with a first ever limited run of orchestral performances. These special shows will see a selection of favorites and deep cuts spanning the St. Vincent discography brought to life in spellbinding new dimensions with the aid of GRAMMY-winning artist and renowned orchestrator, arranger, and conductor Jules Buckley. Together, St. Vincent and Buckley will enlist established local orchestras to forge new sonic worlds from her acclaimed albums, including Marry Me, Actor, Strange Mercy, St. Vincent, MASSEDUCTION, Daddy’s Home and All Born Screaming — in what promises to be a series of unforgettable evenings of unique symphonic reinterpretations of songs from one of modern music’s most eclectic and acclaimed bodies of work.

Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra

Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra is renowned for its passionate performances, innovative learning and engagement programs, and steadfast support of Canadian creativity. Based in Ottawa, the nation’s capital, it has grown into one of the country’s most dynamic ensembles since its founding in 1969.

Under the leadership of Music Director Alexander Shelley, the NAC Orchestra reflects the fabric and values of Canada through inclusive programming, compelling storytelling, and visionary partnerships. Since assuming the role in 2015, Shelley has shaped the Orchestra’s artistic vision, building on the legacy of his predecessor, Pinchas Zukerman, who led the ensemble for 16 seasons. Shelley has championed new works by Canadian composers and expanded the Orchestra’s reach through tours, livestreams, and critically acclaimed recordings. Recent projects include a recording series pairing new Canadian compositions with tone poems by Richard Strauss.

In fall 2025, the Orchestra announced an exciting new chapter with the appointment of world-renowned Finnish conductor John Storgårds as its next Music Director, beginning in the 2026–2027 season. Storgårds, who has served as Principal Guest Conductor since 2015, is a beloved member of the NAC Orchestra family. Over the past decade, he has led countless unforgettable concerts, showcased daring new music, and developed a rare chemistry with the musicians.

The Orchestra regularly collaborates with performers of global renown, including James Ehnes, Angela Hewitt, Renée Fleming, Hilary Hahn, Jeremy Dutcher, Jan Lisiecki, Ray Chen, and Yeol Eum Son. These partnerships underscore the Orchestra’s reputation as a destination for world-class musicians and a home for the next generation of artists.

Principal Youth Conductor Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser is an internationally recognized artist who creates innovative and inclusive concert experiences, helping reinvigorate the Orchestra’s mission to engage new and diverse audiences. Beyond the concert stage, the Orchestra’s learning and engagement programs strengthen local arts ecosystems, deepen community connections, and foster cultural exchange. Its family and school programming includes interactive performances, side-by-side mentorship with young musicians, and community concerts designed to spark curiosity and inspire a lifelong love of music.

The NAC Orchestra is deeply committed to professional development. The annual Mentorship Program and two-year Resident Conductor position offer emerging artists opportunities to refine their craft under the guidance of the Orchestra’s artistic leadership, musicians, and administration. Henry Kennedy, the Orchestra’s inaugural Resident Conductor, will conclude his term at the end of the 2025–2026 season.

Touring is central to the Orchestra’s identity. It has performed in every Canadian province and territory, as well as across North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Asia. During its landmark spring 2025 tour, the Orchestra made its debut in the Republic of Korea and returned to Japan for the first time in 40 years. As it approaches its 100th tour in the 2025–2026 season, the NAC Orchestra continues to inspire audiences and artists alike—honouring its legacy while charting a bold path forward as a national leader in musical excellence and cultural connection.

Azrieli Studio (National Arts Centre)

7:00 pm — Myra Melford's Fire & Water Quintet

• Mary Halvorson - guitar
• Ingrid Laubrock - tenor and soprano saxophones
• Tomeka Reid - cello
• Lesley Mok - drums
• Myra Melford - piano

In the world of improvised music, so-called supergroups sometimes feel almost quotidien. After all, there are so many remarkable artists in the space and understandably, they often want to collaborate.

Yet the group that acclaimed pianist and composer Myra Melford has assembled here invigorates that tired cliché with fresh meaning. Each has an impressive catalog as a bandleader and collaborator, and Melford had worked with all of them previously, but never together. The result is a gathering of some of the most compelling improvisers working today.

The idea to create the ensemble occurred to Melford while planning a June 2019 residency at The Stone, the storied New York avant-garde venue. “It just felt like there was a lot of potential for good chemistry,” she says. The response to the quintet’s debut, one-off performance, a minimally rehearsed amalgamation of composed ideas, text directions for interaction and collective improvisation, was so enthusiastic that Melford was asked to record and tour with the music and this new ensemble.

The COVID-19 pandemic put a damper on the initial recording and touring plans, but Melford used the delay as an opportunity to expand what’s become a sort of suite. The concise, potent recording was eventually made at Firehouse 12 Studios in New Haven, Connecticut over the course of about a day and half. Although the release sounds whole on its own, Melford says it will continue to evolve and be further expanded for an upcoming tour.

It is also what Melford calls the “first installment” of a multi-part project inspired by the work of Cy Twombly. Twombly’s art has been a touchstone for Melford for years. Seeing a 1994 retrospective at MoMA made her want to dig deeper into his process, as she sought to further refine her own.

“I read that when Twombly was a young artist, one of the things he did to train himself was to turn out all the lights at night and draw in the dark,” she recalls. “He was interested in what it felt like to make the line more than what it looked like, and that seemed like an apt metaphor for how I play the piano. For me, it's all about the gesture and the energy. Of course, there's a sound to it, but it's almost as if the sound is the information I get after the impulse to make a gesture.”

That visceral, urgent quality is instantly obvious in For the Love of Fire and Water , as it is throughout Melford’s vast oeuvre. Yet like the collection of Twombly drawings, Gaeta Set (for the Love of Fire & Water) , from which the album takes its name and inspiration, the recording tempers all that gesture and feeling with an astute editorial eye — purposefully using provocation and cacophony to abut quieter sounds and blank space. The result is grounded, with the organic, elemental ideas that Twombly sought to portray coursing through close to the surface. In the album’s crescendos and calm, listeners can also feel the tempestuousness, power and unpredictability of the natural world — themes that Melford also traces back to her pilgrimage with the Huichol Indians of Mexico, recalling their belief system, and how it’s centered on the idea that “they live in a divine and sacred landscape,” as she describes it. Melford visited Gaeta, the small coastal town in central Italy where Twombly made “For the Love of Fire and Water.” “I was mesmerized by watching the sunlight on the water,” she says. “My sense is that's what he was drawing, the different ways that the sea and the sun interact.” Yet that collision is just one of the many ideas behind this project — while Melford hopes that listeners can see the drawings, and even plans to project them at some performances of the work, she stresses the project is hardly a literal interpretation of either Twombly’s drawings or the earthy concepts in their title. Instead, they are more like reference points for a work that thoughtfully combines each improviser’s distinct aesthetic in service of an ever-intriguing whole. The ten movements accompany ten of Twombly’s drawings. From the first, in which each member of the quintet plays with ideas about repetition with intentionally overlapping solos and melodic ideas, to the fourth, which features an elegiac unison melody that Melford likens to a foggy day and Ibarra playing detuned Filipino gongs — “The goal was for everybody to color the notes, the timbre and the attack differently each time they played it,” Melford says — to the eighth, in which the solos were recorded over an asymmetrical, hand-clapped beat, each is pointed and distinctive with a diffuse, shared spotlight that makes the ideas of every improviser really sing.

Melford’s vibrant, rich soloing grounds the project, offering bassy grounding quality at times and overwhelming sound and feeling at others. Reid’s cello is both romantic and pleasingly abrasive, while Halvorson’s glitchy guitar can be urgent or ethereal depending on the track. The album’s ending, what Melford describes as a chorale, ends with the pianist and Halvorson carefully fading out while playing sweet abstractions, like a sun slipping behind a horizon.

The force and purpose of this album is characteristic of Melford’s work, which she continues to create at a prolific clip while working as an educator — a pace that she says comes from simply wanting to learn more. “I want to get better at this, and I want to expand what I can do,” says the former Guggenheim fellow and Doris Duke Performing Arts Award recipient. “It's partly driven by this feeling like, ‘Well, I haven't really gotten it yet,’” she concludes, laughing. In this particular attempt at getting it, Melford partnered for the first time with a group of musicians who happen to all identify as women — a dynamic that the bandleader has found herself seeking out more often in recent years. She is a member of two all-women trios, Tiger Trio with flutist Nicole Mitchell and bassist Joëlle Léandre, and MZM with koto player Miya Masaoka and electronic musician Zeena Parkins. “Coming up as a woman in this music, it felt important to show that I could play with anybody and not put myself in a box,” Melford says. “But as I’ve gotten older, it’s felt more important to support both my female-idenitfying students and peers. So I thought, if I can put a great band together that happens to be all women, why not?” Thus, a new — and hopefully enduring — supergroup was born.

Elgin St. Stage (Confederation Park)

7:30 pm — The Robert Lee Group

• Robert Lee - upright bass
• Jacqueline Teh - vocals
• Sangah Lee - guest vocals
• Jen Lo - piano
• Roa Lee - gayageum
• Allison Au - saxophone
• Jay Yoo - guitar
• Jon Catanus - drums

Robert Lee is an upright bassist, composer, and bandleader in the Toronto jazz scene. He is a graduate from the University of Guelph and Humber College music programs. He obtained his Masters in Contemporary Performance from Berklee Valencia in 2021. He has performed at various venues and festivals across Ontario and internationally, including the Toronto Undergraduate Jazz Festival, the Guelph Jazz Festival, the Newmarket Music Festival, the Kensington Market Jazz Festival, Jimmy Glass Off Festival (Spain), MusicFest Canada, and the TD Toronto Jazz Festival.

Robert performed on the 2024 Juno Nominated album “ Little Bit a’ Love” by vocalist Denielle Bassels. He was named a Toronto Arts Foundation Finalist for “Breakthrough Jazz Artist” in 2025.

The Robert Lee Group is a unique project consisting of original compositions inspired by Korean folk stories and poetry, spanning various fantasy and romantic narratives. The project aims to develop an artistic identity founded in the emotional provocation of jazz and improvised music while exploring and implementing Korean traditional elements into one cohesive creative theatre. Robert has delved deeper into exploring his identity as a Korean Canadian, questioning what it means to simultaneously straddle two contrasting cultural identities. Featuring Jacqueline Teh (vocals), Sangah Lee (guest vocals), Jen Lo (piano), Roa Lee (gayageum), Allison Au (on saxophone), Jay Yoo (guitar) and Andrew McCarthy (drums) the project blends jazz improvisation, R&B/soul, folk, and film music with Korean traditional elements into a seamless amalgamation of colourful textures and unique arrangements.

10:30 pm — SALIN

Salin is a Thai-born, Canada-based drummer, Juno nominated producer and composer. Her current music explores the enchanting sounds of Northeast Thailand and marries it with the 70’s psychedelia of West Africa, all through the lens of modern soulful production, in which she coined this new genre “Afro Isan Soul.” Through her music, she ponders themes of identity, spirituality, and humanity, all paired with a dose of fun to create a unique sonic journey for her listeners.

With recent appearances on Chanel’s Summer Tour in Bangkok, Winter Jazz Festival and her a run of headline shows in the US, including a sold out night at Lodge Room in LA and opening for Yussef Dayes in Central Park. She recently released her album ‘Rammana’ which was created with both local Thai and Canadian musicians, bringing together elements of East and West. This album has received wide acclaim and Salin recently featured on BBC 6Music and a KEXP live performance. A forthcoming Maida Vale recording and European wide tour cements Salin as an exciting new prospect in modern world Jazz.

Fourth Stage (National Arts Centre)

6:30 pm — Flore Laurentienne

• Mathieu David Gagnon - lead artist, keyboards, synthesizers
• Jean-Christophe Lizotte - cello
• Mélanie Bélair - violin I
• Ligia Paquin - alto
• Chantal Bergeron, violin II
• Robbie Kuster - drums
• Antoine Létourneau-Berger - percussions, gong, keyboards

Rooted in the Québec landscape and inspired by the vastness of the St. Lawrence River, Flore Laurentienne’s music— a harmonious blend of strings and analog synthesizers—takes us on a journey to the edge of the sublime, where we find ourselves both fragile and powerful, suspended between vulnerability and wonder.

Flore Laurentienne draws inspiration from contrasting worlds: the melodic clarity and counterpoint of Johann Sebastian Bach; the narrative intensity and progressive audacity of King Crimson; and the electronic minimalism of Hans-Joachim Roedelius. From this unexpected encounter at the crossroads of classical, progressive, and experimental music, a dense and generous sound emerges, with unapologetic lyricism and dynamic textures. While deploying a unique and sophisticated language, Laurentienne's music seeks depth rather than complexity.

On stage, Flore Laurentienne comes to life through a core ensemble of seven musicians. At the center stands composer and keyboardist Mathieu David Gagnon, surrounded by a string quartet and two keyboardists-percussionists. Over the past five years, they have developed a rich shared experience of live performance, a natural rapport and an instinctive bond that nourish both the project and the composer’s work. The power of the MiniMoog, the ensemble’s emblematic instrument, combined with the richness of the strings, creates a captivating interplay that draws the listener into a unique and memorable experience.

Since the release of the group’s debut album Volume I (2020), Flore Laurentienne has enjoyed undeniable success within the vast realm of instrumental music. The project has won over audiences and charmed critics, earning three Félix awards, a GAMIQ, a JUNO, and a spot on the Polaris Music Prize Long List. The piece “Fleuve no 1” was chosen to open the CHANEL runway show during Paris Fashion Week. Flore Laurentienne has shared the stage with renowned artists such as William Basinski, Colin Stetson, Mabe Fratti, and Brìghde Chaimbeul, and has graced the stages of numerous festivals, including Le Guess Who?, Trans Musicales, Big Ears Festival, and the Montréal International Jazz Festival. The project also stands out in the media sphere, having been invited twice for live sessions at KEXP and receiving support from BBC Radio 6 Music, Billboard, Stereogum, France Culture, Ouest France, Les Inrocks, La Presse, Le Devoir, Radio-Canada, among others.

9:00 pm — The OSTARA Project

• Amanda Tosoff - piano
• Rachel Therrien - trumpet
• Valérie Lacombe - drums
• Allison Au - saxophone
• Jodi Proznick - bass
• Kim Zombik - composer, vocals

The Ostara Project, led by award-winning bassist Jodi Proznick, showcases the strength and creativity of Canadian women in jazz. Ostara artists are top-tier musicians, composers and bandleaders who reflect the geographical, cultural and creative diversity of Canada’s musical landscape. Guest vocalists are invited to join the instrumental group on a per-project basis. The Ostara Project’s self-titled debut album was nominated for a JUNO award in 2023. For the past two years, the group has been working on The Ancestors’ Project, a two-album project that includes the instrumental album, “Roots” (Rhea Records, April 2025), the upcoming vocal album,

“Wings” (Rhea Records, spring 2026), along with two performance videos and a mini- documentary. The group has toured extensively across Canada, including a cross-country festival circuit in 2023, and is planning a European tour for 2027.