Bremner Fletcher

Bremner was born in NYC and grew up in the USA, Scotland and Canada. Singing is the only thing he ever wanted to do. As a kid, his family could hear him singing his way home from school. He started in Punk Rock bands, trained in opera, toured with musical theatre, and created his own shows.  He now lives in Montreal. He has six albums of jazz-inspired cover songs, but in 2024, with New Orleans' finest musicians, he recorded his first album of originals, and will be releasing and touring them in 2025.

After studying traditional Opera at Montreal’s McGill University, Bremner attended the 20th Century Opera Performance Program at Alberta’s Banff Centre. Banff’s approach, which encouraged innovation and non-traditional performance with generative artistic collaborations, shaped his career. Working in the intersections between speech, song and storytelling, he has created solo musical performances which have taken him to festivals across North America, Europe and Asia. His six recorded albums stretch from the songs of John Cage to new arrangements of Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, with a special focus on the innovative songwriting of Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht. 

He has performed with jazz bands, classical chamber ensembles, and orchestras and sung classical opera and avant-garde works from the 20th Century Classical repertoire. He has sung the American Songbook in New Orleans with swinging jazz bands, and toured Europe and Japan with Broadway ensembles. He specializes in the music of the Weimar Republic, working with small chamber ensembles, singing the innovative, radical songs of Weill, Hollaender and Eisler. One of his proudest moments came in 2015 in Yerevan, Armenia, when he was invited to perform his musical show Singing Into the Dark, 1933 to open the International Festival dedicated to the 100th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. 

Bremner says, “I strive to take risks in performing and to explore new ways of telling stories in song. I hope to create adventurous, innovative music that explores the contemporary world, is an asset to my community, and respects the legacies of communities and voices before me. Creating a song and a performance means collecting fragments of ideas, researching a moment in history, and stepping into the rehearsal room where I improvise until songs and stories coalesce. My work shifts with each project: taking its inspiration from history, celebrity culture, gender, music and personal experience and often focuses on the act of performance. I hope to create work that is popular, politically relevant, and empowering.”