Michael Davidson

Toronto-based, Canadian vibraphonist & composer Michael Davidson, has built a reputation on moving fluidly between genres, consistently defying stylistic boxes. His music has been described “as sensuously immediate, yet questing, as it is both structurally rigorous and open in poetic effect,” (The Jazz Journal).

Michael is an in-demand collaborator, leader and side person across the improvised, jazz, and creative music scenes. His musical pursuits blur the lines between composition and improvisation drawing equally from jazz, free music and classical traditions.

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Michael has worked with many of the active jazz and improvised music players in Toronto and internationally including recent collaborations with drummer, Joe Chambers,  vibraphonist David Friedman, and saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell.

With double bassist Dan Fortin, he has started an independent record label, Elastic Recordings, exploring music that blurs the boundaries between improvisation and composition. Upcoming releases include collaborations with David Binney, Joe Chambers, Tommy Crane, and host of Toronto & international artists.

With this label, he has become more active as a producer and recording engineer, on albums such as Clock Radio. 

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In Clock Radio, “Listeners will appreciate this duo’s uncanny ability to corral compositional elements balanced by harmony, melody and flexible rhythms, manifesting ideas in the purest form of creation” (Jazz and Beyond).

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Michael co-leads Clock Radio, Hobson’s Choice & Aline’s étoile magique, leads Michael Davidson’s Thursday (a large ensemble featuring his original compositions), and is an avid solo performer.

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With bassist Dan Fortin, he has helped to foster a community of musicians that are exploring the meeting of improvisation and composition with their new independent label, Elastic Recordings, and duo, Clock Radio.

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Michael also co-lead the chamber jazz quartet Hobson’s Choice during its tenure, a staple on CBC’s The Signal, which was cultural icon Laurie Brown’s carefully curated show featuring music existing in the gaps. They released three stunning albums, including Of the Waves. Hobson’s Choice fully exemplifies Michael’s fascination at hybridized forms – where curiosity and imagination can direct the flow over a perceptual need for stylistic adherence – and the infinite potential of collaboration, where ideas bounce from one mind to another, a subtle recursive dance. 

His music is an alchemized structure of spontaneous creation moving outside of conventional circumscription and deep into the centre of each moment.

Michael approaches improvising with passion and stunning sensitivity, as well as Monk-like wit. He is an active composer in the realm of jazz, and his inventive compositions are featured in Aline’s étoile magique, Michael Davidson’s Thursday, Otterville, Clock Radio, and Hobson’s Choice. He has been composing seriously since 2001. Michael has received OAC and TAC funding to embark on large scale composition projects for these groups.

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Michael recently received a 4.5 star review in the illustrious Downbeat Magazine for Aline’s étoile magique:

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“….there is often so much of interest going on that it will take time to fully savor it’s beauty and originality. 4.5 star”

-Scott Yanow, Downbeat 2023.

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Michael’s playing has received praise for his duo with bassist Dan Fortin, Clock Radio:

“…the musicians marshal their forces with superb discipline, producing a wonderfully fresh sound which also manages to possess the requisite amount of mystery..”

-Raul da Gama, The WholeNote, 2019.

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You can hear Michael performing around Toronto and regularly at Jazz festivals with Aline’s étoile magique, Allison Au’s Migration, Clock Radio, Joe Chambers, Michael Davidson’s Thursday, Virtuoso guitarist and composer David Occhipinti’s Camera ensemble, Adjacent Spheres (his ongoing monthly residency at The Tranzac celebrating Thelonious Monk & adjacent musics on the first Sunday of most months – see calendar). The Ryan Driver Sextet (spontaneous arrangements of psychedelic jazz ballads – last Sunday of every month at The Tranzac) and Andrew Downing’s Otterville.

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Valuing inter-generational dialogue, you’ll see Michael regularly at haunts like the Emmet Ray as a side person in some of the myriad new projects conceptualized by exciting younger artists including, Angelica Zavala, Simon Williams, Miles CK, Tymish Koznarsky, David Hodgson & Madeleine Ertel, to name but a few of the many. 

These ensembles and pursuits represent the diversity of Michael’s artist vision, moving through structures & processes with imagination & spontaneity.