For Winnipeg artist, songwriter and producer CEC, creativity rarely fits neatly into one role or genre. Music takes shape through curiosity, collaboration and a willingness to let different people, influences and experiences change the final result.
CEC brings BRIEFLY Unplugged to Jazz at the Fort Garry Hotel on Sunday, Nov. 15, presenting the songs in a stripped-back setting closer to how many were first written. Photo by Megan Kwan, 2025.
🎧 Listen Along: CEC has put together this week’s Artist Selects, offering another way into the sounds and influences surrounding their work. Listen along while reading the feature — and hear some of the music that helps provide context for CEC’s own approach to songwriting, production and collaboration.
CEC has never been particularly interested in choosing one lane.
That applies to music — where R&B, folk, soul and singer-songwriter influences move easily through their work — but it also describes the way they’ve approached life outside of it.
“I think not only in music, but that’s very much a way that I live my life,” CEC says.
They credit supportive parents who encouraged them to pursue whatever caught their interest. Today, alongside being an artist, songwriter and producer, CEC is also a competitive hockey player.
“I think things can support each other no matter how different they are,” they say. “Because I have so many interests outside of music as well, I think it shows in the music.”
CEC sees the boundaries between genres becoming less relevant for artists and listeners alike — and connects that instinct to experiences well beyond music.
“Why would you want to put any limits on yourself?”
“I’m also an older sister,” they say. “Being on teams my whole life, being an older sister, the oldest daughter in a family, it very much already comes with reading people and responsibilities and knowing how to fit where you need to.”
This way of thinking has shaped the way they approach a song, too.
“I don’t need to be the centre of everything,” CEC says. “Even on ENORMOus, I don’t even sing on the chorus.”
Released in 2025, the single is a good example of CEC’s collaborative approach. Rather than needing every part of a recording to point back toward them, CEC is interested in bringing the right pieces together.
“I just want to create,” they say. “That is where I have the most fun, is creation and play.”
CEC performs at Little Brown Jug during the 2024 Winnipeg International Jazz Festival. Photo by Salvador Maniquiz.
Then comes the description that perhaps best captures their role:
“If I can bring all these amazing musicians together, I sometimes think about it as like I’m a curator — the music that I’m creating.”
That idea of creating the conditions for other people to make things has also become part of CEC’s work beyond their own records.
CEC moves freely between R&B, folk, soul and singer-songwriter traditions — resisting the idea that creativity needs to stay in one lane. Photo by Megan Kwan, 2025.
At The Clubhouse, the Winnipeg creative space they operate, musicians and other creators can share equipment, co-work, write together, record and experiment. CEC sees an interesting contradiction in the growth of home recording.
“With the increase of so many home studios in the last 15 years, it’s changed the creation process in a good way,” they say. “A lot is more accessible to record and produce, but also has really created a lot more isolation.”
The Clubhouse offers another possibility: community and collaboration.
“To have a space where we’ve pooled gear, where people can come and co-work and people can come and work on projects together or have co-writes, it’s been really special,” CEC says.
They’ve deliberately tried to make it somewhere people can arrive without already having everything figured out.
“We’ve really tried to cultivate a sort of a community where people feel comfortable to come and record or have their events or anything that doesn’t necessarily fit into a typical studio or venue.”
That openness carries into CEC’s songwriting as well: some songs come directly from a specific experience, while others collect pieces from different places.
“A lot of the stuff that I write is either like a puzzle piece kind of experiences,” they say.
CEC studied creative writing at university, and other art frequently became part of the process.
“Sometimes I just have lines when I’m reading something else or listening to something else that then pops out,” they say. “And then I like to create a world out of that.”
CEC extends the same freedom they want as an artist to the musicians they listen to. Some of the albums that became most important to them didn’t connect immediately.
“Sometimes it took a couple months,” they say. “I came back to it and then it really hit me, and now it’s stuck with me forever.”
“I’d love to hear that people grow as well.”
That has made them skeptical of treating an artist’s career as a fixed progression of successes and failures.
“I don’t want to hear an artist who is making the same album four times,” CEC says. “I’d love to hear that people grow as well.”
A record can meet a listener differently depending on where both happen to be at that moment.
“I’m willing to grow with an artist,” they say, “and things will intersect differently with my life where I am and where the artist is as well.”
For CEC, those different parts of life don’t need to stay separate. The instincts learned from hockey can carry into the studio, and an intuitive songwriter can still find common ground with a formally trained musician. Even a record that doesn’t connect at first can reveal something different months later.
That same openness shapes the way CEC creates. It isn’t about controlling every detail, but about bringing the right people and ideas together — then leaving enough room for the music to become something unexpected.
CEC presents BRIEFLY Unplugged at Jazz at the Fort Garry Hotel on Sunday, Nov. 15.
You Can Help Create the First Opportunity
CEC’s first-ever paid performance was with Jazz Winnipeg — an early professional opportunity that helped open the door to what came next.
Your support helps Jazz Winnipeg create more of those moments by bringing artists and audiences together, supporting live performance and keeping jazz thriving in our city.
