Ryan Driver’s new album consists of brand new original songs. Inspired by the more adventurous figures of jazz and other musical genres, Driver turns off the guiding light of traditional form and convention and instead reaches in the dark for something more profound, his every note, melody and lyric a question thrown out into the universe. He may never quite find the answers, but it’s in the act of searching that he carves out his musical identity.

Ryan Driver is a singer, songwriter, and improvising musician based in Toronto. Besides his own projects, he has sung and/or played guitar, piano, flute, analogue synth, melodica, and/or his simple homemade instruments (thumbreeds and streetsweeper bristle bass) with Eric Chenaux, Sandro Perri, Jennifer Castle, Baby Dee, Doug Tielli, Alex Lukashevsky, Devon Sproule, Kim Barlow, Thom Gill, Michelle McAdorey, John Southworth, Mary Margaret O’Hara, and many others. Since 1999 he has also led The Ryan Driver Quartet / Quintet / Sextet, playing monthly performances in Toronto. Favouring the ballads of the American Jazz Era, as well as most recently those of composer and songwriter Stephen Parkinson, Ryan plays piano and sings in this group featuring some of Toronto’s most accomplished and most experimental musicians (Martin Arnold, Brodie West, Rob Clutt on, Nick Fraser, and Michael Davidson). Ryan has toured internationally with notable performances at the Angelica Festival of New Music in Bologna, Italy; Heartland Festival in Vevey, Switzerland; Canadian Blast at Trafalgar Square and the Barbican in London, England; Bergenfest in Bergen, Norway; Tanned Tin Festival in Castellon, Spain; and Sound Symposium in St. John’s, Newfoundland.