Born in Montreal, Haitian-Canadian musician-composer Jowee Omicil plays a fabulous variety of saxophones, clarinets, trumpets, flutes, piano, and keyboards. He came of age in the choral milieu of his father’s Montreal congregation, studied saxophone and music education at Berklee, and gleaned much from engagement with figures including Wyclef Jean, Tony Allen, Ibrahim Maalouf, Roy Hargrove, Kenny Garrett, Pharoah Sanders, Branford Marsalis, and Marcus Miller among others.

Over the course of 2025, Omicil released sMiLes one song per month, each accompanied by a philosophizing podcast. The album opens with a striking reinterpretation of singer and Civil Rights activist Abbey Lincoln’s “Throw It Away,” whose message Omicil invokes in his voiceover, an expression of kinship in creative philosophical outlook. (For good measure, Omicil revisits the title on a distinctive “Throw it Away - FuLL oF LoVe Remix.”) Lincoln’s own 2007 rendition on Abbey Sings (Verve) offers critical context, itself worth a comparative audition for the original melody and the contemplative character of her lyrics.

Throw it away, throw it away
Give your love, live your life, each and every day
And keep your hand wide open, let the sun shine through,
Because you can never lose a thing, if it belongs to you.

In less accomplished hands, the quirky sampling, effects, instrumentation, and wide-ranging, scruffy, sonic bricolage of sMiLes could make for one muddy mélange. But no danger lies here in Jowee’s paradoxical, provocative, sound-shifting extended groove. Omicil's voice and sax blend almost imperceptibly in “SOeuR FeLiX AKA BeeHive.” In “Trip to GHanA,” polyrhythm meets wah-tone high-life guitar, cackly sax, and wordless vocalise.

Other titles transport the listener to Haiti, Morocco, Cape Verde, Jupiter, and Mali. “LeTTre Du MALi PouR JonaTHan” is a meditative, revelatory piano solo nearly ten minutes in length.

sMiLes may invoke the free-blowing spirit of Miles (as on the sound-effected “MiLes ConvoY”), but there is no anxiety of influence here. Far from a rote genuflection to musical antecedents, the prevailing voice throughout is purely Omicil’s. As he counsels, “trust the note.”

"Seek for the sound that is within you and the [instrument] will drive you to your destination… the singularity of sound is what I have always been searching for, the sound that comes from the heart, the sound that maybe, perhaps, is only heard in nature, this is what we are looking for when we are talking about sound… deep down, heartfelt uniqueness, always connected with the spirits…" - Jowee Omicil

In accord with his music education formation, Omicil also leads music workshops through his BasH! AkademY, “a close-knit setting embracing spontaneity, authenticity, and shared growth,” which in 2025 included “a nomadic music experience traveling the world” to Mindelo, Cabo Verde. In 2026 Omicil will perform in New York, Canada, Martinique, France, Germany, Austria, Poland, Romania, the UK, and an African tour in the planning stage.

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