Winnipeg's Jazz Magazine



upcount

Deconstruction Blues

straight up

Anna-Lisa Kirby: Coaching the Next Generation of Singers

July/August 2017: Anna-Lisa Kirby

Summer Play: Jazz in the Garden

Marc Tugby

Rahsaan Roland Kirk: I Talk With the Spirits

on the street where you live

Jazz on Wheels: Into the Neighbourhoods!

July/August 2017: Anna-Lisa Kirby

Chris Potter

you won’t forget me

Greg Lowe

reflections

The Tales We Tell

upcount

Blur the Lines

straight up

Buster Williams: Always Something More

May/June 2017: Buster Williams (Festival Edition)

Christian McBride

Gregory Porter

Mavis Staples

Jimmy Greene

Reel Jazz

Luc Guenette

tune-up

Showing Your Maths

May/June 2017: Buster Williams (Festival Edition)

Artie Shaw: Highlights from Self Portrait

Bokanté

reflections

Waiting for Wings

Jazz in Winnipeg

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Saturday, April 29 – The McMahon Group – Silver Heights Restaurant

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Saturday, April 29 – Ron Halldorson & Ken Gold – Inferno’s Bistro Academy

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Saturday, April 29 – Afro-Cuban with Papa Mambo Trio – Hermanos Restaurant & Wine Bar

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Saturday, April 29 – Woody Holler & his Orchestra – The Palm Lounge (Fort Garry Hotel)

Friday, April 28 – Open Jam Session for High School Students & Friends

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Friday, April 28 – Brazilian Duo with Marco & Sheila Castillo – Hermanos Restaurant & Wine Bar

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Friday, April 28 – The Burton Trio – The Prairie Ink Café (Grant Park Mall)

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Friday, April 28 – Woody Holler & his Orchestra – The Palm Lounge (Fort Garry Hotel)

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Friday, April 28 – Jazz at InFerno\’s – Inferno’s Bistro Academy

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Thursday, April 27 – Gabriela Ocejo – Hermanos Restaurant & Wine Bar

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Thursday, April 27 – Grant Leutschaft – The Palm Lounge (Fort Garry Hotel)

Thursday, April 27 – Sargent Jams – X-Cues Billiard & Café

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Tuesday, April 25 – Mike Swikkis – Centre culturel franco-manitobain

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Tuesday, April 25 – Jazz at InFerno\’s – Inferno’s Bistro Academy

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Monday, April 24 – Monday Night Jam – Vinyl Revival

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Sunday, April 23 – Amber Epp: Great Canadian Songbook – Park Theatre

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Saturday, April 22 – The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Improvised Soundtrack – Aceartinc

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Saturday, April 22 – The McMahon Group – Silver Heights Restaurant

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Saturday, April 22 – Ron Halldorson & Ken Gold – Inferno’s Bistro Academy

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Saturday, April 22 – Afro-Cuban with Papa Mambo Trio – Hermanos Restaurant & Wine Bar

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Saturday, April 22 – Nightfall – The Prairie Ink Café (Grant Park Mall)

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Saturday, April 22 – Mini Ministers of Cool – The Palm Lounge (Fort Garry Hotel)

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Friday, April 21 – Brazilian Duo with Marco & Sheila Castillo – Hermanos Restaurant & Wine Bar

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Friday, April 21 – Mini Ministers of Cool – The Palm Lounge (Fort Garry Hotel)

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Friday, April 21 – Jazz at InFerno\’s – Inferno’s Bistro Academy

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Thursday, April 20 – Gabriela Ocejo – Hermanos Restaurant & Wine Bar

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Thursday, April 20 – Grant Leuschaft – The Palm Lounge (Fort Garry Hotel)

Thursday, April 20 – Sargent Jams – X-Cues Billiard & Café

Winnipeg, Manitoba – Tuesday, April 18 – Ron Pasley – Centre culturel franco-manitobain

The Art of the Daily

Written by:

A few weeks ago, I spent a wonderful hour listening to a recording of the BBC’s 2015 John Peel Lecture. (Facebook can be a great portal…) The featured speaker, Brian Eno—sound artist, producer, and thinker extraordinaire—was tasked with exploring the value of the creative industries. To get there, he started by tangling with the big question about what art might be.

Here’s his broad premise: “art is everything that you don’t have to do.”  Just sit with that for a minute—it’s such an odd notion!

So what are these things we don’t have to do? Here’s one of Eno’s compilations: “Symphonies, perfume, sports cars, graffiti, needlepoint, monuments, tattoos, slang, Ming vases, doodles, poodles, apple strudels. Still life, Second Life, bed knobs and boob jobs. All of those things are sort of unnecessary in the sense that we could all survive without doing any of them, but in fact we don’t. We all engage with them. So the first question is why is any of that important? Why do we do it?”

Eno points out that we humans are endlessly stylizing our world, embellishing and transforming the essentials like food and clothing and movement. (“We have to move,” he observes. “But we don’t have to do the rumba, the tango, the Charleston and the twerk.”) People take this stylization very seriously too, developing elaborate systems of expression and evaluation. We are committed to fine differences, and take pride in our ability to distinguish fine gradations of excellence. We connect with—or separate from—others through our stylizing.

Eno suggests that we use our constructions to explore imaginary worlds—to play the way we did as kids. (Remember when a stick was a sword?) Then we shuttle back and forth between that fantasy and our reality. It’s straightforward to see this process with a novel or movie: we are invited to sink into the promises or terrors of an alternate reality, and bring that perspective to our own experience.

But he extends that analysis to more generic kinds of expression, too. Pretty much everybody has a hairstyle, he observes, and none are completely random. “When you choose to wear your hair one way rather than another, what you’re really doing is saying I belong to this particular world where this kind of hairstyle would exist. You’re broadcasting something, but you’re also very alert to all the other hairstyles that you see around you. So you’re in receive mode as well. And what I think you’re doing then is you’re positioning yourself in all the possible stylistic worlds that could exist, you’re taking a certain position. And that’s an identification for yourself, it’s an identification for other people as well.”

Think for a moment about this feedback loop: with every haircut, we express ourselves, we respond to other hairstyles, and we relate to a whole catalogue of what we know about hairstyles. This sophisticated set of interactions sounds like a description of what jazz musicians do every time they gather. They express their individuality, they support and respond to the expressions of others, and they speak within an awareness of what has come before. They make something alive, something beautiful, something simultaneously real and fantastic.

I love to think that we can begin to see the artistry imbedded in our daily lives—the gloves we wear on a cold day, the dash of cardamom in our dark roast coffee, the sound track to our evening yoga stretches, the chatter with our kids. I love that we might look at the stuff that’s non-essential, and celebrate the energy and imagination involved in fancying it up, stylizing it, making it say something about ourselves as specific individuals, but also about ourselves as a collective of thinking people.

Eno says we must rethink our tendency to see art as somehow a luxury, something to be indulged in once the real stuff like science and math and engineering are securely entrenched. Art is essential. To shunt it away undermines the richness of our everyday lives, flattens down our thinking, and drains the energy out of our communities.

And ultimately, the healthy community is what supports and enables artists. Our habit is to fixate on specific individuals who rise out of the masses (“we’re very keen on the names,” Eno says), but we overlook the communities they come from. The attainments of our most celebrated artists are only possible because of a whole ecosystem of talents and opportunities and engaged people—and ecosystems are complex, interconnected, non-hierarchical, and constantly rebalancing. They are delicate. They require care.

As Eno puts it: “genius is the talent of an individual, scenius is the talent of a whole community.” Here’s to the scenius of this wonderful but sometimes timid prairie city. Let’s all commit to the artistry of our lives. May we all be more daring with our haircuts, pause to appreciate the perfect foam on our latte macchiato, and dance a bit as we stand in line at the grocery store…


Copyright! © 2023 dig! magazine.