Haley Freedlund

Roomful of Teeth is a Grammy® winning vocal band dedicated to reimagining the expressive potential of the human voice. By engaging collaboratively with artists, thinkers, and community leaders from around the world, they seek to uplift and amplify voices old and new while creating and performing meaningful and adventurous music.

Role: Tour Manager - US / EU

Photo by Anja Schütz

Songs We Love was first presented as the 2016 Season Opener at Jazz at Lincoln Center as a journey through the first 50 years of jazz song. Under the musical direction of Riley Mulherkar, three guest vocalists join an all-star band made up of New York’s rising stars. Combining their distinct talents, the group sings their way through four decades of music, beginning with the early blues and jazz of the 1920s and ending in the early 1950s. Iconic singers explored include Ma Rainey, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland.

Role: Tour Manager - US / CAN / EU

The follow-up to Oluo’s musical Now I’m Fine, SUSAN is a story about the failings of men and the endurance of women. It is a crystalline slice of American life; a collision of class, race, bodies, love, and men with bad intentions; a tragedy about the most comically optimistic person on earth. This darkly comic musical portrait of Oluo's mother builds one story out of many, a journey from Section 8 housing in 1980s Seattle to the mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta to the Clallam Bay Correctional Facility. With stunning new compositions combined with soul-baring stand-up interludes, Oluo explores two intertwining narratives: his mother’s life as the white, Midwestern wife of a Nigerian chief and, later, a destitute single mother; and his own journey to Nigeria, as an adult, to visit his late father’s village and discover a family on the other side of the world. 

Reviews: The Seattle Times, Crosscut

Role: Band Management, Company Manager, Trombonist, Photographer

Photo by Haley Freedlund

Drummer, composer, and teacher Allison Miller created In Our Veins as an exploration of the cultural and ecological life of rivers. This multisensory experience combines original jazz music with tap dance and video projections, all inspired by 5 great American rivers. In collaboration with her band, Boom Tic Boom, tap dancer Claudia Rehardjanoto, and video designer Todd Winkler, Miller constructs a captivating chronicle of the James, Delaware, Potomac, Hudson, and Susquehanna Rivers. Through collaborative performance art and the stories of these natural phenomena, In Our Veins illustrates the ecosystems that are vital to human life and community.

Role: Tour Manager

NOW I'M FINE, the life's work of comedian and composer Ahamefule J. Oluo, is simultaneously a ten-movement experimental pop opera for 17 piece orchestra and a long-form comedic storytelling piece. Oluo delivers dark, blistering monologues about a profound period of illness, despair, and regeneration in his life, seamlessly interwoven with original music written during the traumatic events described. The scale of the piece is both epic and intimate—ranging from one man reliving quiet, private pains alone in a spotlight to a wall of brass and harp and voice and drums. NIF has been performed at the Public Theater (NYC), Clarice Smith (Baltimore), and locally at The Moore, On The Boards, and Town Hall Seattle.

Reviews: The New York Times, On The Boards

Role: Band Management, Tour Management; Arts Admin

Photo by Haley Freedlund

Real Enemies is a GRAMMY- and JUNO-nominated multimedia work that investigates America’s fascination with conspiracy theories. Filmmaker Peter Nigrini, writer/director Isaac Butler, designer Maruti Evans, and composer Darcy James Argue with his Secret Society, collaborated for over two years to create this piece. Projection surfaces teeming with found footage, live video, and historical texts explore dozens of narratives - the Red Scare, the Illuminati, Edward Snowden, alien sightings - all meticulously examined and interrogated. Real Enemies premiered at the BAM Next Wave Festival (Brooklyn, NYC) in November 2015, and has since given performances at Holland Festival (Amsterdam, NL) and National Sawdust (Brooklyn, NYC).

Reviews: The New York Times, The Guardian, JazzTimes

Role: Assistant Director

Photo by Haley Freedlund

Champagne is a short film that tells the story of a woman facing a real challenge in her world, without her “woman-ness” ultimately being her undoing. Champagne is the lead chef in a particularly peculiar restaurant. She works with her newly hired assistant to create something memorable - and beyond the traditional boundaries of masculine cuisine - for the unique, unusual patrons that she serves. The film’s protagonist navigates the complexities of being a leader, a creator and a nurturer at the same time - a struggle that mirrors the experiences of many women in the real world. Inspired by world-creators and auteurs like Hayao Miyazaki and Jane Campion, this story aims to become a part of the new creative standard: diverse, complex, poetic, and ultimately rejecting the narratives that perpetuate harmful stereotypes. 

Champagne is currently in post-production and applying for the 2020-21 festival circuit.

Role: Producer; Promotional Production and Outreach

Founded in 1985, The Seattle Improvised Music Festival (SIMF) stands as the oldest festival in the United States dedicated to wholly improvised music: no sheet music, and no score; nothing but musicians, instruments, and the moments they create before an audience. In recent years, SIMF has expanded from a 3-day festival at Good Shepherd Center's Chapel to a weeklong affair taking place in rotating venues all over the city and featuring a new curation of local and national artists annually.

Role: Co-curator, Producer; Production Management

Photo by Haley Freedlund

Combining collaborative evening performances with daytime in-school concerts and a weekend creative music workshop, Seattle-bred, New York-based brass quartet The Westerlies created Westerlies Fest to engage students and audiences in Seattle and surrounding underserved areas to give back to the city that raised them. Events took place across King County, with produced shows at the Wing Luke Museum, First Free Methodist Church, and Erickson Studios.

Role: Production Management, House Management; Event Media

Photo by Haley Freedlund