Name: Joy Guidry
Nationality: American
Occupation: Bassoonist, improviser, performance artist, composer
Current event: Joy Guidry is one of the acts appearing at the XJAZZ! 2025 festival in Berlin. For tickets, go here.
Recent release: Joy Guidry's new album Five Prayers is May 31st 2025 out via Jaid.  

If you enjoyed this Joy Guidry interview and would like to stay up to date with her music, visit her official website. She is also on Instagram, and bandcamp. 



The XJAZZ! Festival is just around the corner. Tell me just a little bit about your performance at the Festival, please.

For this show, I will be performing my new project Five Prayers, which features me on bassoon, singing, poetry, archival recordings, and electronics.

There will be many moments of bliss, reflection, and meditation. There will also be a section that has a lot of noise, preaching, and maybe some dancing.

Overall, it will be a time for all of us to practice some escapism.

How, would you say are your live performances and your recording projects connected at the moment? How do they mutually influence and feed off each other?

I would say the recorded project is the blueprint and the foundation of most or all of my live shows.

I take the material I recorded and see how I can build on top of it, manipulate it, and expand the material for a live setting that tells a more vivid story.

In as far as you have any experience or insights, what's your view of the Berlin jazz scene?

The Berlin jazz scene is always down to clown, which I really love. It has always felt like you can try anything, and it's usually always a safe space to do so.

I’ve had some really great memories trying out entirely new performance practices in Berlin, and it was so comforting feeling the support from the audience throughout my experimentation.

Tell me a bit about the sounds & creative directions, artists & communities, as well as the colleagues & creative hotspots of your current hometown, please. How do they influence your music?

Houston has such a huge influence on my music in the way that it’s such a beautiful and very complex city. From the rattling doors on a slab, the sound of rodeos, the sound margarita glasses clinking at happy hour at your favorite tex-max spot.  

I have so much pride in being from Houston, and getting to incorporate the different styles of music into my practice. Musical styles like Gospel, Zydeco, RnB, HipHop, and so many others.

There's so much rich history in Houston as well, especially Black history. The people in Houston are so loving and somehow almost every person knows how to cook, but more importantly everyone's always down to eat.

With its strong communal practice whether that be at church, the gym, your neighborhood, sports arena people are very often united in Houston. All of this love flows into my music, especially in my new album Five Prayers.

What does the term jazz mean today, would you say?

Jazz today can mean many different things, and that is both a positive and a negative.

I like that more people use Black American music instead of Jazz because Jazz is so expansive, and its foundation comes from Black Americans. I also think Jazz is a title a lot of white curators, A&Rs, and other people in the industry put on many Black artists who find themselves in between genres and want to have an easy way to label us.

On the positive side, there are so many different styles you hear in Jazz today, as the styles have continued to expand over the years. I have loved the expansion, especially in what people call spiritual Jazz, which has become one of my favorite types of music to listen to and make over the last few years.

Where do most of your inspirations to create come from – rather from internal  impulses or external ones? Which current social / political / ecological or other developments make you feel like you need to respond as an artist?

Most of my inspiration comes from when I think about the American South, which is where I’m from. When I reflect on my memories of growing up there, I can see this film in my head, and then I go to the computer and try to find the sounds and create a film score to my own memories.

Other times, inspiration can come from when I’m reading a certain text, or when I have moments of love, heartbreak, or even reflecting on past traumas that still haunt me.

At the moment, I feel most compelled to respond to the violent anti-Black transphobia that Black trans women face on a daily basis.

Thanks to technological advances, collaboration has become a lot easier. What's your view on collaboration and its ongoing role for the music you make?

It’s so amazing to see all of the different ways artists can collaborate in 2025 with the advancement of technology.

For my music, I really love collaborating with other Black artists who are from the American South. There’s a certain unspoken shared energy that I feel often when I work with people from near my region.

I do typically enjoy collaborating, but for the past year, I have been more closed off than normal and trying to figure out my own voice more.

What do you generally look for in a collaborator and what made you want to collaborate with the musicians you're playing with for your XJAZZ performance?

I really look for a collaborator that is open-minded and that can really ride the waves. Most importantly, I love working with people who know how to read the energy and find an ending instead of just dragging things out.

For XJAZZ, I’m performing solo for this show and won’t have collaborators.

In terms of the results, the process, and the satisfaction, how do making music in the same room together versus filesharing compare to you, real concerts vs live streams?

Oh to me, it’s not comparable at all.

There's something about being in the room and creating together whether that be on a stage or in the studio that can’t be recreated with virtual or file sharing in my opinion.

What role do electronic tools and instruments play for your creative process?

Electronics play a huge role in my creative process in the way that it helps me paint the entire picture that my mind has projected in my head.

It helps me provide so many more textures, harmonies, and experimentation that isn’t possible for me to achieve with just my bassoon.

Ímprovisation is obviously an essential element of jazz, but I would assume that just like composition, it is transforming. How do you feel has the role of improvisation changed in jazz?

Truthfully I don’t have an extensive background in Jazz, as I have an upbringing in classical, and experimental music.

So for this question I might come back to it in a few years.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to improvisation?

When I’m improvising, I first need to pray and open up a channel of communication between myself and my ancestors. I also need to scan my own body and energy levels to see what part of me wants to speak at this moment, to figure out what I even have to say.

When I’m playing solo, it feels like I'm speaking poetry through my instrument, which helps me write out these phrases and soundscapes with my bassoon and electronics.

Swedish pianist and composer Mathias Landæus told me: “Every person in the audience has an effect on the music. The more improvised the music is, the bigger is the potential of each person to effect the sound in the room.” What do you make of that?

I see where they are coming from, and I relate to their thoughts in a way.

Improvisation for me relies a lot on comfort and energy. Sometimes the energy of the room can just be off on some days, and it can definitely have an effect on my improvisations.

How would you describe your own relationship with your instrument – is it an extension of your self/body, a partner and companion, a creative catalyst, a challenge to be overcome, something else entirely?

My bassoon and I have had a very difficult relationship over the years, but as of three years ago, I feel like it is a true extension of my soul.

In a way, live performance remind us of the transitory nature of life. When an improvisation ends, is it really gone, just like a cup of coffee? Or does it live on in some form?

I believe it lives on in the memories that get stored not just in the listeners’ or creators’ minds, but also in their souls.