Jazz and Social Change

Terri Lyne Carrington is an NEA Jazz Master, a Doris Duke Artist and a four-time Grammy winner who has been working since she was ten, when she became the youngest musician ever issued a union card in Boston. She has played on more than 100 recordings and toured with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Stan Getz, Esperanza Spalding and Dianne Reeves, and in 2013 she became the first woman to win the Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, for Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue.

Much of her recent work is about who gets to be in the room. She founded and directs the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, edited New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers, and recorded new STANDARDS vol. 1 from it, which won a Grammy in 2023. Her 2025 album We Insist 2025!, made with vocalist Christie Dashiell, reimagines Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite.

Kris Davis is a Grammy-winning pianist and composer with 27 recordings as a leader or co-leader. She works where jazz, groove and contemporary classical music meet, and has recorded and toured with Terri Lyne Carrington, Dave Holland, John Zorn, Craig Taborn, Ingrid Laubrock, Tyshawn Sorey and esperanza spalding. Born in Vancouver and raised in Calgary, she is coming home for this one.

Davis was named a Doris Duke Artist in 2021 and has been voted Pianist of the Year in the DownBeat Critics Poll four times, most recently in 2026. She is Associate Program Director of Creative Development at the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, teaches piano and composition at the Jazzcampus in Basel, and is a Steinway Artist.

Jodi Proznick is a bassist, composer, educator and producer based in Vancouver, and no stranger to BJP: she has played the house with the Trine Trio and the Noah Franche-Nolan Trio, and came to Calgary with Audrey Ochoa as a guest artist for Girls in Jazz in 2024. She was named Jazz Artist of the Year at the 2019 Western Canadian Music Awards, has four JUNO nominations, including for the albums Foundations and Sun Songs, and received the British Columbia Lieutenant Governor's Arts and Music Award in 2022.

She heads the jazz program at the VSO School of Music, where she also directs the Summer Jazz Workshop and Sister Jazz Day, and is co-artistic director of The Ostara Project with pianist Amanda Tosoff.

Audrey Ochoa is an Edmonton trombonist and composer whose records refuse to sit in one genre. Her debut, Trombone and Other Delights (2013), spent three weeks at number one on the Canadian jazz charts; Afterthought (2017) topped the Canadian chart again and reached the US top 20; Frankenhorn (2020) added strings to the horns; and The Head of a Mouse (2023) earned her a 2025 JUNO nomination. The Sorceress follows in 2026.

She has shared stages with Hilario Duran, PJ Perry and Tommy Banks, and with Marcus Miller, Chris Potter and Lew Tabackin, and holds the Edmonton Music Prize for her contribution to the city's arts community. At Jazz and Social Change she leads the Girls in Jazz Honour Band, returning to a workshop she headlined with Jodi Proznick in 2024.

Dr. Jada Watson is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities in the School of Information Studies at the University of Ottawa and principal investigator of SongData, a research program that uses song and artist data to study how music genres form and who gets heard within them. Her reports on radio programming and popularity charts measure how often songs by women, artists of colour and LGBTQ+ artists are played on country and other formats in the United States and Canada, and they have become a reference point in the industry's conversation about representation.

She holds a PhD in musicology from Universite Laval and a Master of Information Studies from the University of Ottawa, and received the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities' Outstanding Early Career Award.

Kathie Van Lare was born and raised in Calgary and has taught music in the city and the surrounding area for 35 years. She directs the Calgary Women's Jazz Collective, the big band of women instrumentalists that anchors the Girls in Jazz gala each year, and co-organizes the Girls in Jazz workshop with Sarah Drew, keeping the repertoire to music composed or arranged by women.

She guest conducts and adjudicates across Western Canada, plays freelance trumpet with orchestras and ensembles around the region, and holds the Alberta Band Association's Elkhorn Award and the Women Band Directors International Scroll of Excellence.