Credit: Deneka Peniston
FAY VICTOR
Sound Artist, Composer, Educator
Fay Victor is a sound artist that uses performance, improvisation and composition to examine representations of modern life and blackness while honing a unique vision for the vocal role in jazz and improvised music. Victor has an ‘everything is everything’ aesthetic, using the freedom in the moment to inform the appropriate musical response, viewing the vocal instrument as full of possibilities for sound exploration. The voice, a vocal conduit for direct messages in an improvising context. Victor embraces all of these ideas in real time, aiming to push the vocal envelope to forge greater expression. On Victor’s 11 critically acclaimed albums as a leader one can hear the through line of this expansive expression including Victor’s current release, WE’VE HAD ENOUGH on the ESP-Disk label is the 2nd outing from Victor’s improvising quartet, SoundNoiseFUNK.
Victor’s work has found light in media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Rolling Stone Magazine & The Huffington Post; Victor’s performed with luminaries such as William Parker, Roswell Rudd, Dr. Randy Weston, Nicole Mitchell, Misha Mengelberg, Myra Melford, Archie Shepp, Marc Ribot & Tyshawn Sorey to name but a few; Performance highlights include The Museum of Modern Art & The Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), The Hammer Museum (LA), The Kolner Philharmonie (Germany), De Young Museum (SF), Symphony Space (NY), The Earshot Jazz Festival (Seattle), The Winter Jazz Festival (NYC) and the Bimhuis (Netherlands). As a composer, Victor has been awarded prizes such as the 2017 Herb Albert/Yaddo Fellow in Music Composition and a 2018 AIR in Composition for the Headlands Center for the Arts in the Marine Headlands in Northern California. As an educator, Victor is currently on the Faculty at the New School of Jazz & Contemporary Music, chairs the Advisory Board for the Jazz Leaders Fellowship via the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music a new initiative to fund and support black female and non-binary jazz artists. Fay continues to give talks, lectures and masterclasses on Jazz, Creative Improvisation, Political engagement through artistic expression and more at institutions around the world.