Len Aruliah

Saxophone 

Len Aruliah is a freelance musician active in London and Vancouver. He released his first album Full Circle in 2007 with a quartet playing his compositions and has recently recorded current works with a new sextet. In London, Len has worked with the Charles Condy Quartet, Paul Weinreb’s Tarantula, the Hot Orange Big Band, the 4Seasons Band, and his own groups. He has also toured the UK with singer Gene Pitney, worked in theatre orchestras in London’s West End, and has toured the world performing on cruise liners. Len studied at UBC and the Banff Centre, working with great musicians such as Julia Nolan, David Branter, Stan Karp, Fred Stride, Hugh Fraser, Kenny Wheeler, Pat LaBarbera, and Don Thompson. Len holds a B. Mus. degree from UBC and is an experienced music educator, having worked in various London colleges, academies, and schools.

Kris Bowerman

 Trombone

As a child Kris took years of private lessons on trombone, ending up with a Bachelor of Music in trombone performance from San Francisco State University. At age seventeen he began passing on his knowledge to younger students, giving one-on-one instruction to aspiring trombonists as well as students of the trumpet, French horn, euphonium (baritone), and tuba.

The first two major performances for Kris were at the Monterey Jazz Festival — performing with some of the most well-known jazz artists of the time (Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Clark Terry, Gerry Mulligan, Bill Watrous, and others). He went on to perform in symphony orchestras, Dixieland bands, swing bands, Renaissance groups, brass ensembles, an original music group with his wife Lark, and in small group jazz bands.

Presently, Kris runs a small jazz group called the Kris Jay Trio, which performs around the Vancouver area for various events, including concerts. Under the name Kris Jay, he is also publishing original music featuring trombone on platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music.

Brent Gubbels

 Bass

Brent Gubbels has been a Vancouver based professional musician and teacher for nearly twenty years. In that time he’s worked with a number of local musicians and ensembles including the Hard Rubber Orchestra, Gypsalero, Rumba Calzada, John Reischman, the Vince Mai Project, Jesse Zubot, Dal Richards, Lee Aaron and Dee Daniels.

Since 1992, he has toured North America and Europe extensively and played a variety of international jazz and folk festivals. Brent can be heard on recordings by Oscar Lopez, Gypsalero, Juno nominees Susan Crowe and Compadres, Juno winner James Keelaghan, and others.

Thomas Holden

Trumpet

Thomas Houlden is a Vancouver-based brass player with deep influences from Kenny Wheeler, Booker Little, and Bob Brookmeyer. He directs a large ensemble (The Thomas Houlden 11tet) built off the legacy of the Rob McConnell Tentet to perform his original compositions and arrangements, invoking sounds from The Boss Brass, The Jazz Messengers, and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra. He regularly performs around Vancouver as a small and large jazz ensemble player, and trumpeter/arranger covering video game music with the jazz-fusion band missingNo. since 2012.

Thomas holds an B.Mus in Jazz Studies from Capilano University where he studied trumpet with Brad Turner and Kevin Elaschuk, and a M.Mus in Jazz Performance from the University of Toronto where he worked with Chase Sanborn and Jim Lewis. He has performed with world-class musicians including Dave Liebman, Randy Brecker, Claudio Roditi, Bill Frisell, and John Abercrombie. He studied arrangement and composition with Terry Promane and John MacLeod of The Boss Brass, as well as Vancouver’s Jill Townsend and Rejean Marois. His pieces have been played by the Hard Rubber Orchestra and by various university and high-school ensembles across Canada.

When not writing or performing, Thomas currently works as a band teacher, private instructor, and jazz/brass clinician in the Greater Vancouver area. He has begun remote-recording several of his 11tet compositions, hiring a rotating cast of musicians from across Canada, which are available on his YouTube channel. A four-track EP by the Thomas Houlden Sextet recorded in 2018, “The Price of Wisdom,” is also available for purchase and download on Bandcamp.

Brad Muirhead

 Trombone

Brad Muirhead is well known to audiences across Canada and Europe for his powerful sound and inventive improvising and has been involved in the Vancouver music scene as a performer, composer and arranger for more than 20 years. He has recorded and toured extensively with his own groups Primal Orbit and Brass Roots as well as the NOW Orchestra, Hugh Fraser’s VEJI, and the Hard Rubber Orchestra. His latest original projects as a leader are “The Brad Muirhead Quartet”, his original modern jazz outlet and “Propulsion”, a hard-hitting jazz/funk horn band with Brad on Tuba-bass. Brad has been very active as a music educator and has held such positions as Coordinator of the Banff Summer Jazz Workshop, Producer of the Vancouver & Victoria International Jazz Orchestra Workshops and Artistic Director of the Renfrew Community Performance Project.

ROn Samworth

Guitar

Ron Samworth (guitarist) is known on the Canadian improvised/contemporary music scene as an inventive textural improviser and a strong fluid soloist inspired by a variety of traditions including jazz, rock, contemporary and world musics. He leads the Vancouver-based quartet Talking Pictures and co-directed the acclaimed NOW Orchestra from 1993-2003. He is also a member of The Unexpected, a Montreal-Vancouver collective, the Peggy Lee Band, DarkBlueWorld, François Houle’s electro-acoustic quartet and the Hard Rubber Orchestra. He has appeared at all the major Jazz Festivals across Canada, the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, at New York’s Knitting Factory, and the New York Improvisation Festival, New Music America, Vienna’s “Let’s Cool One” Chamber Jazz Festival, Chicago and Berlin jazz festivals, and other leading venues in Europe. He has performed with many of the leading voices in contemporary music such as John Zorn, Dave Douglas, Evan Parker, Barry Guy, George Lewis, Wayne Horvitz, Kuzuhisa Uchihashi, Yasuhiro Otani, Butch Morris, Han Bennink, Barre Phillips, Marilyn Crispell, Claude Ranger, René Lussier, and Jean Derome.

Elliot Polksy

Drums 

Based in Vancouver, BC – Elliot Polsky is known for being a versatile, intuitive and musical performer. He is skilled in multiple musical styles on drum set, world and hand percussion – Elliot has performed live on stage locally, nationally and internationally. He has many studioand live recordings to his credit, and has provided leadership and guidance to many students, some of whom have gone on to their own professional careers. His performing arsenal includes the drum set, along with a variety of percussion instruments from all over the world. He is noted for his creativity and ability to blend hand percussion with the drum set into a hybrid percussive and musical style completely his own.

From the early 1990’s to today, Elliot has performed on dozens of recordings, and hundreds of stages. He has performed and/or recorded projects with a varied group of musical artists. Urban Bandscape, Leela Gilday, Pacifika, The Good Noise Vancouver Gospel Choir, Zubot and Dawson, George Leach, Jim Byrnes, Norine Braun, Dave Quinn Quartet, Jamie Croil, Mariam Matossian, The Higgins Family Band, Gary Fjellgard, The Paperboys, Steve Dawson, Danielle Hebert, Babe Gurr, are a sampling of the many fine artists Elliot has had the privilege of sharing the stage or performing on their recordings.

Elliot also has performed with several artists who have won a variety of major awardsincluding: Four Juno-award winning projects, Maple Blues Awards, Aboriginal Music Awards, Canadian Folk Music Awards, Western Canadian Music Awards and West Coast Music Awards.

Elliot has many years as an educator, having guided students of all ages, whether one on one or in group settings, on the drumset in many styles, and with hand percussion.

  Stephen Robb

director – WInds, Piano

Stephen is an accomplished clarinetist jazz pianist, saxophonist, and arranger performing both classical chamber music and jazz idioms, performing the gamut from classical clarinet, chamber, and orchestral repertoire to jazz standards, original compositions, and free improvisation. Stephen is a graduate of Queen’s University at Kingston, McGill University in Montreal and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Currently, Stephen is Music Director of the Delta Community Music School, and the Music Director and Principal Conductor of the Richmond Delta Youth Orchestra. He teaches clarinet, saxophone and jazz piano at the Delta Community Music School. He is a member of the Kris Jay Trio and leads his own jazz piano trio.