Our 2024 Adjuicators:
Conductor, Robert Payne, a graduate of the Brandon University School of Music (BU, 1986), with a major in piano and a double minor in trumpet and percussion, is a retired music educator who taught concert band, wind ensemble, jazz band, chamber ensemble, percussion, and piano for 31 years in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Mr. Payne completed post-graduate wind band conducting seminars with Eugene Corporon, Allan McMurray, Dale Lonis, Paula Holcomb and Rodney Winther. He also holds a diploma from the Canadian Wind Conductors Development Program.
Mr. Payne has performed as guest conductor for the Manitoba Provincial Junior Honour Band, the Manitoba Central Region Senior Honour Band, and numerous other Divisional and Regional Honour Bands over his career. He has been a clinician and adjudicator at many music festivals throughout the Province of Manitoba and was the Musical Director of the Elmwood Summer Band Camp for 10 years. Mr. Payne served the Manitoba Band Association throughout his career on multiple committees and presided as Board President for six years. In 2019, the Manitoba Band Association honoured Mr. Payne with their most prestigious Award of Distinction – “In recognition of his outstanding contribution to music education in Manitoba”. Also in 2019, he served as the Chair of the National Youth Band of Canada. Since moving to Kelowna in the Spring of 2017, Mr. Payne has performed with the Kelowna City Concert Band, volunteered with the Central Okanagan Jazz Festival and the Okanagan Symphony Youth Orchestra, and has performed with the Okanagan Symphony Orchestra. Most recently he was appointed as President of the Board of Directors for the Kelowna Community Music School Society. Mr. Payne served as substitute conductor for the Kelowna Community Concert Band intermittently through the 2018 and 2019 seasons, and in the spring of 2020, Mr. Payne was appointed to the position of Artistic Director and Conductor for the Kelowna City Concert Band. Zeena Zaiyouna is an orchestral conductor, oboist, pianist, clinician and educator. Together with a Master of Lifelong Learning (M.Ed.) from Denmark and a degree in oboe performance from Queen’s University, Zeena has served as the Assistant Conductor of the Ontario Pops Orchestra and has taught music and performance at all levels of the school system. This includes directing the Symphonic Band for the Canadian Independent Music School Festival (2019) at Roy Thomson Hall.
Zeena's musical background includes piano improvisation and studying orchestral conducting with Maestro Andre Presser in Holland and Maestro Harold Faberman at Bard College in New York state. She has performed oboe and English horn with orchestras including the Greater Toronto Philharmonic Orchestra, Ontario Pops Orchestra, Harthouse Orchestra, Counterpoint Orchestra, and Kindred Spirits Orchestra. She is also a Toronto and Ontario Arts Council recording artist recipient. As an arts advocate for youth leadership and mental health, Zeena has trained teachers on four continents, sharing innovative aspects of play-based learning and trauma-focused arts programming. This includes emergency education and psychosocial support training in Liberia, Africa, and implementing an outdoor creative learning workshop at Toronto Metropolitan University for undergraduate students during the pandemic. Zeena is the newly appointed Music Director of the Okanagan Symphony Youth Orchestra and works as a clinician, musician and teacher in the Okanagan Valley. Jim Howie is a high school music teacher who is finding it difficult to completely retire. Various attempts at retirement have been thwarted by emergency subbing for band teachers, adjudicating at festivals like this one, giving trumpet and brass clinics in schools and using the tools he’s acquired in a lifetime of fixing things.
Jim is also a Trumpet player in his 40th season with the Okanagan Symphony Orchestra. That parallel career has included performing with many of the Okanagan’s other musical groups – some fixtures like The Okanagan Festival Singers, Aura Chamber Choir, The Fish-on-Five Brass Quintet, The Michael Garding Big Band and many shorter gigs. He has also slid sideways into a website and YouTube channel - TrumpetHeroes.com - for beginning Trumpet players in an effort to “get all of that stuff out of your head” as his webmaster daughter says! Studying mostly at The University of Victoria Jim earned an Honours Bachelor’s Degree in Music (Performance) on Trumpet with Louis Ranger and later an “accidental” Master’s Degree in Music Education (Jazz) with Ian McDougall. There was a year at UBC as well to get that inevitable Teaching Certificate - inevitable because he had fallen in love with music teaching as a teen volunteer at a summer music camp. Jim taught at Pleasant Valley Secondary in Armstrong for 27 years then spent several more as that school district’s Music Supervisor. He has conducted hundreds of middle and secondary school bands, honour bands, string and youth orchestras, reading clinics and helped countless colleagues improve their craft. He’s really looking forward to this week at the Windscapes Festival. |