Julien Bradley-Combs, Madeleine Ertel and Kae Murphy are the finalists for the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Emerging Jazz Artist Award in 2023.
Supported by Cheryl and Manuel Buchwald, the award comes with a $10,000 cash prize to help further the recording career of an outstanding emerging jazz artist. The two finalists each receive $1,000.
The winner will be announced June 27 at the TD Toronto Jazz Festival.
Julien Bradley-Combs is a guitarist, composer and educator who plays many styles of music in a variety of settings, and is also heavily involved in ZESTcreative, an interdisciplinary collective of contemporary dancers and musicians.
Madeleine Ertel, nominated for the second consecutive year, is a trumpeter, composer, and arranger known for her honest and melodic approach to music-making. A recent graduate of the University of Toronto, she can be found performing in a wide variety of musical contexts throughout the GTA.
Hailing from Owen Sound, Ont., and now based in Toronto, Kae Murphy has studied at the University of Toronto, the New School, the Banff Centre, and the School of Improvisational Music. They have performed internationally with artists such as BADBADNOTGOOD, Whitney, Donny McCaslin, and Maria Schneider.
The Toronto Arts Foundation’s Emerging Jazz Artist Award was established in 2014 to further the career of an outstanding emerging jazz artist. It is intended to support the pre-production, production, and/or recording of original music composed by the recipient.
The panelists who helped assess all applications for the 2023 award are multi-instrumentalist Waleed Abdulhamid, saxophonist Allison Au, guitarist Andrew Scott, and the TD Toronto Jazz Festival’s artistic director Josh Grossman.