Meet Our Team

Robert Williston is the founder of the Museum of Canadian Music, a museum and archive of national scope devoted to preserving, documenting and providing public access to Canada’s recorded music heritage. He is also Founder, President and Director of CitizenFreak Canadian Music Society / Société canadienne de musique CitizenFreak, the federally incorporated not-for-profit organization responsible for the Museum’s governance and long-term institutional development.

Williston has been documenting Canadian music for nearly four decades. He began the project that would become the Museum in Vancouver in 1987, initially building a detailed database around recordings in his own collection. From 1990 to 1992, he hosted The Peaking Canuck Show on CiTR in Vancouver, where he trained under Nardwuar the Human Serviette. The program combined Canadian music with archival audio, interviews and historical material in a format Williston called Canadiana Mixing. The experience helped shape the principle that continues to guide the Museum: recordings are most meaningful when they are preserved together with the history and people connected to them.

In 2009 and 2010, Williston published more than 200 Canadian artist biographies through ItCameFromCanada.com. In 2010 and 2011, he expanded that work through an authorized reissue program that returned rare and long-unavailable Canadian recordings to circulation. Working directly with musicians, families and rights holders, the program included recordings by Artok, Borealis, Dr. Philter Banx, Folklords, Neil Merryweather and hundreds of other Canadian artists.

Over more than fifteen years of intensive Museum development, Williston has researched and written approximately 2,500 Canadian artist biographies and reviews while leading extensive discographical research, collection development and acquisition, digitization, artist and estate outreach, rights-holder correspondence and public documentation. His work has placed particular emphasis on rare, regional, independent, private-press, self-released and historically overlooked Canadian recordings.

The Museum now preserves more than 140,000 physical Canadian music artifacts and approximately 1.15 million sound and image files. Its public platform includes more than 76,000 pages documenting over 6,000 Canadian artists and musicians, connecting recordings with biographies, credits, liner notes, discographies, photographs, artwork and historical context.

In 2026, Williston established CitizenFreak Canadian Music Society. As President, he leads strategic planning, partnerships, fundraising, project development and institutional development while continuing to contribute directly to research, collection development and public documentation.

His current focus is the transition of the Museum from a founder-built archive into a professionally governed and sustainable cultural institution capable of preserving, developing and sharing Canada’s recorded music heritage for generations to come.

Elena Williston is Treasurer and a Director of CitizenFreak Canadian Music Society, with responsibility for financial administration, collections management and governance for the Museum of Canadian Music.

Before joining the Museum’s leadership team, Elena co-owned and operated several cafés and a licensed bar in Alberta and British Columbia. As an owner-operator, she was directly responsible for the financial and day-to-day operation of the businesses, including cash and financial controls, inventory and purchasing, staff supervision and vendor administration.

As Treasurer, Elena oversees the Society’s financial records, budgets, expenditures and grant administration and coordinates with its external bookkeeping and accounting professionals. As a Director, she participates in financial oversight, policy adoption and the governance of the Society.

Her Museum responsibilities also include collections documentation, inventory control, organization and handling of physical materials, and field and project administration. Elena is the Museum’s designated Field Producer and Videographer for field projects, with responsibility for video, photography and field documentation as that work develops.

Her current focus is building the financial, collections-management and field-documentation systems required for the Museum’s next stage of institutional growth and long-term stewardship.

Najam Us Saqlain is a Director of CitizenFreak Canadian Music Society and leads IT and technical services for the Museum of Canadian Music. Najam is responsible for the Museum’s websites, servers and hosting, cybersecurity, data management and technical support, as well as planning for the continued development and resilience of its digital infrastructure.

Najam brings 20 Years of experience in software engineering and application development. His day-to-day work includes Ruby on Rails, Python, TypeScript, AWS and Linux systems administration.

The Museum operates a large public platform supported by a continuously growing digital archive of recordings, images, metadata and research. Najam develops and maintains the systems that keep those resources reliable and accessible, protect the underlying data, and provide the tools required to manage, catalogue and search the collection.

As a member of the Society’s Board, Najam also contributes to technical governance, cybersecurity planning, data continuity and the long-term development of the Museum’s digital systems.

Richard Harrow is a Calgary musician and recording, mixing and mastering engineer whose career in Canadian music spans five decades.

An early home-recording enthusiast, Richard opened The Living Room recording studio in Calgary in 1976. The studio operated from his home through the 1980s and early 1990s, and during that period he worked on recordings for hundreds of artists. His credits include work with Ian Tyson, Gordon Lightfoot, Ry Cooder, Bourne and MacLeod, and Peter Puffin, among many others.

Richard's long association with Ian Tyson included engineering work on a number of Tyson recordings, among them One Jump Ahead of the Devil, Old Corrals and Sagebrush, and Cowboyography. For the Old Corrals and Sagebrush sessions, he took apart his Calgary studio and set it up in Tyson's living room. His engineering and mixing credits also appear on later Tyson releases and compilations.

Richard's work has contributed to two Juno Award-winning recordings. Bourne and MacLeod's Dance and Celebrate won the 1991 Juno Award for Best Roots/Traditional Album, and Peter Puffin's Proud Like a Mountain, which Richard mastered, won the 2011 Juno Award for Children's Album of the Year.

Richard has also received one Platinum record and two Gold records during his career.

In the early 1990s, his work increasingly shifted toward mastering. For approximately sixteen years he operated audiomastering.com, a mastering facility and division of Canada Disc Inc. In 2010 he established HB Media Services Inc., continuing his work in recording, mixing and audio production.

Beyond the studio, Richard provided sound for the Calgary Folk Club for more than eighteen years and has taught audio and media courses at SAIT.

Richard serves as an advisor to the Museum of Canadian Music / CitizenFreak, contributing expertise in recording and studio history, audio transfer and preservation, historical recording practices, mastering, and the Canadian music and recording community.

Dan Donahue is a Winnipeg producer, recording engineer and broadcaster with more than four decades of experience in Canadian music.

Dan began as a folk performer and released two albums under his own name, Long Distance Runner (1978) and Motion (1980). He played the Winnipeg Folk Festival four times in its early years. Working with Daniel Lanois at Grant Avenue Studio on Motion drew him into production, and by 1982 he was producing Heather Bishop's records.

He has since produced more than 300 albums, and close to 400 counting his engineering work, for artists including Connie Kaldor, Valdy, Heather Bishop, Carmen Campagne and Fred Penner. Kaldor and Campagne's Lullaby Berceuse won the 1989 Juno Award for Best Children's Album, and projects he has worked on have drawn more than twenty Juno nominations. He has also recorded orchestras, choirs and classical ensembles, including the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and the Winnipeg Singers.

In 1998 Dan received the Prix Manitoba for distinguished service. He was a founding member of the Manitoba Audio Recording Industry Association, which became Manitoba Music, and has served on the boards of Manitoba Music, the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra and the Music Professionals of Manitoba. He was vice chair of Artists in Healthcare Manitoba, and from 2018 to 2022 he chaired Manitoba Film and Music.

Dan hosts Transcontinental on Winnipeg's CJNU and produces short radio histories of Manitoba music. About 25 years ago he secured federal funding toward an online archive of Manitoba music, a project that stalled when the province did not come on board.

Dan serves as an advisor to the Museum of Canadian Music / CitizenFreak, contributing expertise in recording and production, Manitoba music history, industry networks, archival documentation and the people and institutions that have shaped Canadian music.

Paul Zaza is a Toronto composer, producer, songwriter and recording artist whose career spans more than five decades and more than 160 film and television productions.

Classically trained at the Royal Conservatory of Music in piano, harmony, orchestration and composition, Paul entered professional music as a performer. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he played bass in the Toronto production of Hair at the Royal Alexandra Theatre and later toured with The 5th Dimension.

By the mid-1970s he was established in Toronto's recording community as a performer, arranger, producer and studio musician, and was releasing his own records. He founded Zaza Sound Productions Ltd. as a 24-track recording studio. It later became a post-production and film-scoring operation as his work moved toward screen music.

His breakthrough in film came through his work with director Bob Clark and composer Carl Zittrer. Their score for Murder by Decree won the 1980 Genie Award for Best Music Score. Paul went on to become one of Canada's most prolific screen composers, scoring or co-scoring Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, Porky's, Curtains, A Christmas Story, Turk 182!, From the Hip, The Brain, Iron Eagle IV, Baby Geniuses and many others. His catalogue also includes soundtrack albums, instrumental releases and production work for other artists.

Paul has received multiple SOCAN Awards. His papers, manuscripts and production materials are preserved as the Paul Zaza fonds at Library and Archives Canada.

Paul has donated a large collection of his recordings to the Museum of Canadian Music, including his best-known soundtrack albums, and CitizenFreak.com features an extensive body of his work along with his authorized biography and full credits. He serves as an advisor to the Museum of Canadian Music / CitizenFreak, bringing extensive experience in composition, arranging, recording, production, studio practice, film and television scoring, copyright, publishing and the professional Canadian music industry.

Jason Flower is the founder of Supreme Echo, the Victoria, British Columbia, archival label and record shop he established in 2003. Over twenty-five years, Supreme Echo has become one of Canada's most prolific archival labels, devoted to rare, lost and unreleased recordings, with a particular focus on Canadian underground music.

Each Supreme Echo release is built from original sources. Jason oversees every stage of the work: locating surviving tapes, acetates and cassettes, restoring the audio, recovering period artwork, and researching the history of the music through interviews with the musicians and their own photographs and papers. Much of this work begins with a single surviving copy, and bringing it back can take hundreds of hours before anything is released.

The Supreme Echo catalogue spans Victoria punk pioneers The Dishrags and The Neos, the Calgary punk bands Riot .303 and Suburban Slag, and Northern Haze, the Inuit rock band from Igloolik, along with underground music from across Canada and beyond. His shop on Government Street in Victoria has long been a gathering place for collectors and musicians on Vancouver Island.

Jason has known Robert Williston for around fifteen years, and Supreme Echo shares its releases, packaging and liner notes with the Museum so that each can be documented as it was issued. As an advisor, he contributes his experience in archival research, sourcing and restoring original recordings and artwork, working with artists and estates on permissions, and the independent and underground scenes that larger institutions often miss.

Greg Volk is a contributor to the Museum of Canadian Music, bringing more than 50 years of record and music collecting experience together with a background in broadcasting and a long-standing interest in Canadian recorded music. He has contributed to the Museum since 2023.

Greg lived in Toronto from 1963 to 1990 and grew up in a household where radio and music were part of everyday life. He remembers listening with his family to CBC Radio, including its music programming and Saturday opera broadcasts, before discovering 1050 CHUM-AM on his own transistor radio. The station’s Yonge Street studios were only a short distance from his home.

From 1980 to 1983, while attending Glendon College in Toronto, Greg worked in broadcasting at CKRG-FM Radio Glendon, including as Music Director, gaining direct experience in programming, music selection and radio production. He then studied Radio Broadcasting at Humber College from 1983 to 1984.

Greg began collecting records and music in 1975 and has continued ever since. His collection has spanned 78s, 45s, LPs, cassettes, CDs and digital audio. Over time, his collecting and research became increasingly focused on Canadian music, including recordings and artists that received limited commercial exposure or have become difficult to document.

Greg became aware of the Museum of Canadian Music around 2018 and began contributing directly in 2023. At the Museum, he contributes his knowledge of Canadian recordings, artists and releases to the continuing development of the collection and its documentation. His decades of experience as a collector, together with his broadcasting background, provide a practical understanding of the recordings themselves and the musical and cultural context in which they appeared.