The Canadian Creative Music Collective, which has been performing under the acronym CCMC since 1978, is a Canadian new improvisational music ensemble founded in Toronto in 1974. The group is still active to this day, but has gone through a variety of formation changes over the years, with Michael Snow being the only remaining founding member. Currently, the group performs as a quartet with vocalist Paul Dutton, John Kamevaar on percussion and electroacoustic sound, John Oswald on alto saxophone, and Michael Snow on piano, trumpet, guitar, and analog synthesizer, supported by rotating guest musicians such as Phil Minton and Christian Marclay.
The ensemble started out as an eight-piece. The change of personnel caused constant changes in the style of the sound. Initially, the group was very oriented to free jazz, later electroacoustic instruments entered the scene, such as the synthesizer or sampling.
In 1976 the group founded the concert space The Music Gallery and Toronto, where they performed regularly and frequently. They also provided a stage for other musical-experimental-interdisciplinary projects. They also ran a music label and published a magazine of avant-garde music, and thus were highly involved in inprovisation music in Toronto and Canada.
Polyphasic Recordings' CCMC reissue project describes the group's extraordinary, novel sound as follows: "[...] their sound can never really be pinned down in the way that other devotees of 'free' music usually are; never as dogmatic as AMM, as angry as American free jazz, as bleak as Japanese free jazz or as humorless as European free improv. CCMC are as comfortable playing toys and melodies as they were noise electronics and torrential freak-outs. In the truest sense CCMC were sonic explorers devoted to spontaneous free music, uninhibited by any restriction, be it melody, silence, genre, volume or instrumentation."