David Buchbinder

David Buchbinder is a JUNO award-winning trumpeter, composer and cultural inventor, known for his diverse musical projects the Flying Bulgars, his Jazz Ensemble, Nomadica and Odessa/Havana and was founding artistic director of the Ashkenaz Festival. He produced Shurum Burum Jazz Circus, Tumbling Into Light and Andalusia to Toronto, and is the founder of the urban transformation organization Diasporic Genius.

We caught up with David to learn more about his career

Original cross-cultural creation seems to sneak in to everything I do. I really like the places where ecosystems connect. That can mean: genres, cultures, styles, disciplines, or communities. I realized a long time ago that the place where ecosystems bump up against each other is where there’s always the most life. Also, I’m always looking for something that’s celebratory.

What does music mean to you?

For me, music is the way that humans get to experience or apprehend the underlying structure of the universe. Music is everything. It’s a lullaby, it’s a party, it can express everything from the lowest to the most exalted. And it’s magic, because in a way it can’t be explained. It can’t be quantified. Music is a faculty that we have that provides a direct connection to the things we can’t see.

How do you feel when you’re creating music?

Pretty consistently when I’m composing, I feel irritated - creatively irritated - because it’s rarely easy. Of course there are periods or moments when it’s all clicking, but in the early days when I had a larger ensemble to write for, I always felt that I wasn’t ‘getting it.’ I was reaching for something but I wasn’t grasping it. It took me years to realize that this is actually correct. Because when I’m composing, there’s always something that I’m hearing, but I can never directly translate it. It’s like there’s something better that I’m not quite getting to. It’s only after the music is organized and played and has its own life that I see that it’s fine, and it was the best I could do in that moment.

For performance, I look for the joy spot, the place of freedom, which is not always easy to get to. I don’t think anyone’s ever described it better than Thelonious Monk. He said that ‘when it’s happening, you raise the stage.’ It elevates, basically.

Have you felt that?

Oh, yeah. There’s degrees to get to it. But when it really happens, that is what makes it all worthwhile.

In addition to your musical career, you’re the AD of Diasporic Genius, which works to strengthen communities through storytelling, workshops, festivals and more. Why are you drawn to this work?

I’ve had a very circuitous creative life. I’ve always followed where my interest goes and when I get an idea that resonates with me, I generally do it. It happened with the Ashkenaz Festival, and it happened with Diasporic Genious. With DG I had this vision of how we could build the city differently, in a way that wasn’t just paying lip service to multiculturalism or diversity or the complexity of humanity or what real engagement means. I started asking: what would happen if we help people engage, experience and get empowered through their own creativity? How do we get, say, people in a cultural community centre interwoven with the life of the city, and the life of the people? It’s an experiment in creativity-based city building, and changing the way we organize ourselves. What we’ve been doing is tiny but the vision is fairly big.

The William Kilbourn Award is for those whose work is a celebration of life through the arts. How do you celebrate life through the arts?

Celebration is a big piece. The older I get, the less divisions I see between things. As a creator, it’s remembering that there isn’t a division between daily life, daily struggles, history, politics, economics, spirituality, and art. Art is only a particular way to engage with any of those things. If one can succeed in discovering the celebration of the challenge and joy of raising a child, or cooking a meal, then that can teach you how to discover celebration in an art form.

If you want to make stuff happen you have to be willing to go to the place where it’s not comfortable, where you don’t know and you’re not an expert, where you’re humbled in the face of the mystery of it all. For me, the deep love with mystery is a celebration of life.

We’ve read that you’re about to debut a multidisciplinary project based on the book, The Ward. Can you explain the project?

I’ve been interested in the Ward since I first discovered it when I was doing research around a parade we created in the second Ashkenaz Festival which went through Kensington Market to Harbourfront. I later met Michael McClelland who gave me a book about the Ward, and I thought it would make an amazing musical project. The Ward is Toronto’s original cross-cultural community. It’s the roots of what we’ve become so I wanted to look more into it. I wanted to bring it back to life. We can’t go and visit the buildings, so I started wondering what it sounded like? The idea is to eventually build it into something that fuses the past and the present and looks towards the future. Is it going to be a musical? Is it going to be a multidisciplinary show? We don’t know yet. 

www.davidbuchbinder.ca