About

Dr. Jury Tosh Kobayashi-Mackay is a double bassist, composer-performer, educator, writer, poet, and scholar. His music is inspired by what some might refer to as Free Music, Creative Music, Free Improvisation, Free Jazz, or Jazz. Recently, Jury has begun to write (and publish) poetry as well as music criticism. His music has been featured on the BBC radio and has also been played on independent radio stations in Ontario and Quebec. He performs music around Ontario and Quebec both as a solo artist and in a duo with violist Helen Abbot, with whom he collaborates across multiple mediums.

Jury has an undergraduate degree in orchestral performance from the University of Toronto. Jury also received a master’s in Double Bass performance from the Longy School of Music, where he took additional private lessons in conducting, music theory, ear training, form and analysis, piano, historically informed double bass playing, and jazz. In 2020, Jury completed a master’s degree in Musicology at the University of Western where he wrote his thesis “Domenico Dragonetti: A case study of the 12 unaccompanied waltzes”. Jury recently completed a PhD in Interdisciplinary Research in Music at the University of Ottawa, with a dissertation centred on the music of Cecil Taylor titled “For Cecil Taylor: A Research-Creation and Paracritical Approach to Analyzing Free Music.”