Indexical is pleased to present a solo performance by bassoonist and composer Joy Guidry. The concert will be followed by a conversation with the artist hosted by acclaimed composer and theorist James Gordon Williams, Assistant Professor of Music at UC Santa Cruz.

Joy Guidry is a bassoonist, versatile improviser, performance artist, and composer of experimental, daring new works that embody a deep love of storytelling. Joy’s music channels their inner child in honor of their ancestors and predecessors. 

AMEN is Joy's third release. The conception of this album came from many talks with her ancestors, which then turned into an eight-track project. Amen meets at the intersection of many subjects in music, gender, sexuality, and Blackness. Joy approached this album from her own lived experience as a Black transwoman who was raised in Houston, Texas, and southwestern Louisiana. This project experiments with different southern Black American music forms, such as jazz, gospel, and ambient. This project was created to provide her peace, warmth, community, and release for this chapter of her life. This performance features Joy on bassoon, electronics, voice, and poetry.

James Gordon Williams is a transdisciplinary composer, pianist, and cultural theorist. He has collaborated with artists Crystal Z. Campbell, Maria Gaspar, Fred Moten, Moor Mother, Cauleen Smith, and Suné Woods. He has performed, and or recorded with, Terri Lyne Carrington, Anthony Davis, Mark Dresser, Joseph Jarman, Charli Persips’ Supersound band, Gregory Porter, George E. Lewis, saxophonist Greg Osby, Charenée Wade as well as other musical luminaries. He has also performed at Birdland, El Museo del Barrio, the Institute of Arts and Sciences, Lenox Lounge, Knitting Factory, San Jose Museum of Art, Symphony Space, Village Vanguard, UC Santa Cruz Music Recital Hall, and music festivals in France, Italy, and Malta. He was commissioned to write music for Syracuse Stage’s staging of playwright Kyle Bass’s salt/city/blues. He is the author of Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space (2021) published by University Press of Mississippi. His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology Review, Jazz & Culture, Jazz Research Journal, Journal of African American Studies, Liquid Blackness Journal of Aesthetics, and Black Studies. He is an Assistant Professor of Composition at the UC Santa Cruz Music Department, and an affiliate faculty member in the Visualizing Abolition certificate program and the History of Consciousness program. He holds a Ph.D. in Integrative Studies (Music) from the University of California, San Diego.