Multiple Grammy, Academy, and JUNO Award nominee Chet Doxas is a saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer whose expansive vision brings virtuosity and expressive depth to all his work. He approaches music as an act of witnessing: composers listen inward, performers give voice to what they discover, and improvisers uncover new possibilities in real time. This philosophy informs his collaborations with pioneering composers and performers, including Carla Bley, Steve Swallow, Michael Formanek, Dave Douglas, Darcy James Argue, and Benoît Charest.
Doxas’s playing and improvisations were integral to the soundtrack of Les Triplettes de Belleville, nominated for both Academy and Grammy Awards. His honors include SOCAN’s Hagood Hardy Award for composition and repeated recognition in DownBeat’s Critics Poll.
His creative projects bring improvisation into dialogue with visual art, architecture, and early music. Rich in Symbols takes paintings as the starting point for original compositions, while Larum, his collaboration with electronic musician Micah Frank, explores Hildegard von Bingen’s music through woodwinds, electronics, and improvisation. His spatial work Agora places the sound and meaning of architecture at the center of the musical experience. Across these projects, Doxas explores how sound shapes our experience of place, memory, and the present moment. His performances unite a composer’s perspective with an improviser’s spontaneous invention.
Raised in Montreal, Doxas began performing professionally as a teenager before earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in jazz performance at McGill University. Now based in Brooklyn, he has appeared at Carnegie Hall and Washington’s Kennedy Center and holds the first tenor saxophone chair in the Canadian National Jazz Orchestra.
