School of Music

Jeff Torbert is active as a performer, educator, composer, and facilitator of improvisation and creativity.

As a full-time faculty member at Acadia University, Jeff guides music students in advanced musicianship practices, performance, improvisation, and guitar. Jeff works individually with guitar students interested in expanding their creative and performance capacities as well as those pursuing a more specific career such as studio musician, songwriter, educator, or music therapist. Jeff also leads second year music students in a capstone project where they organize and perform a concert fundraiser each spring: this past year (2021) the students raised over $3000 for the Jane Paul Indigenous Women’s Resource Centre in Sydney, Cape Breton.

Performing as an electric and acoustic guitarist and sometimes-pianist-vocalist, Jeff has made music in dozens of genres and contexts, from accompanying opera singers to Tango and Bossa Nova bands, from improvisation collectives to Symphony Nova Scotia, stretching across the fields of pop, folk, rock, and jazz. Jeff has two albums of original music under his name, This Weather Honest (2009), and Urban Poultry & Other Hopes (2011), each earning multiple Music Nova Scotia and East Coast Music Award nominations. The latter album featured Jeff’s frequent collaborator Kenny Talkowski on saxophones and was followed up with a tour of the Netherlands and Belgium in the spring of 2016. They are currently planning another project together scheduled for the fall of 2022. Jeff has also been a frequent collaborator on other artists’ recordings, such as pop musician Rich Aucoin’s Hold and We’re All Dying To Live, jazz vocalist Zoe Leger’s The Girl From Yesterday and folk-crossover musician Anne Janelle’s So Long At The Fair.

Other recent projects include playing guitar in a multi-media project with Canadian soprano Suzie Leblanc with music by composer Jerome Blais entitled mouvance, with 2019 shows in Halifax, Montreal and Joliette, Quebec, with a studio recording scheduled for 2021. Jeff is currently working with US composer Daniel Heidt on a new work written for solo guitar and electronics (2022 tentative) after premiering Heidt’s multi-movement work Dr. Stringlove as part of the 21st Century Guitar Conference in Lisbon, Portugal (March 2021).

Education
2004    B.Mus., Dalhousie University

Website
https://jefftorbert.bandcamp.com/

Links to Performances and Recordings
Dr. Stringlove by Daniel Heidt, world premiere performance during The 21st Century Guitar Conference, 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ9KoXZbndg&t=15697s
Playing & Hearing Music 3 2021 class performance and fundraiser for The Jane Paul Indigenous Women’s Resource Centre
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ9KoXZbndg&t=15697s