John Heward Trio

John Heward is a Montreal-based drummer (and painter, sculptor extraordinaire) who has been content to let the world beat a path to his door.  For over the past two decades, John has quietly become one of the world's leading percussionist working in the field of contemporary improvised music, new music, and avant jazz.  Music luminaries including David Prentice, Glenn Spearman, Malcolm Goldstein, Joe McPhee, Dominic Duval, Lisle Ellis, Paul Bley, and many hundreds of others, have sought him out during their Canadian sojourns.  As Bill Smith of Coda put it, "John is one of Canada's foremost improvising percussionists."

Born, raised, and living in Montreal, John is both a visual artist and a creative musician who has always explored and expanded the boundaries of his craft.  John quotes his most influential drummer as Marvin Boogaloo Smith, who played with Archie Shepp.  As John says, "he came down on day and we exchanged notions and he said that he always worked on the principle, gotten from Zen thinking, of working on the figure eight, a continuous circling around and joining, and that struck me.  So I wasn't interested in just playing straight beat, on or behind or in front of.  I was interested in being able to do it, up to a certain extent, so that there are times in the music when you want a straight beat for a while just so you could set up something so that you can break it, and that's really the principle of my drumming, to set up something so that it could be broken into something else."