There’s an evolution going on in this city and a lot of new things are emerging. Two transformations stand out as particularly significant. One big change is in our narrative. We went from the place in the middle of nowhere to the place in the center of everything. I’m not saying that we are the […]

On Saturday, November 10, one of the most creative young jazz vocal musicians will be performing in Winnipeg and I couldn’t be more excited about it! Cyrille Aimée is a 27-year-old French woman with a French father and a Dominican mother. Her hometown of Samois-sur-Seine is the same village in which the great jazz guitarist, […]

Michael Philip Mossman has an interesting story. He got into music by listening to whatever he could find on the radio in Philadelphia, then figuring out how to play what he heard on his trumpet. He made up a whole notation system, and didn’t really learn to read music until he got into high school. […]

None of us will be at a loss for the perfect holiday gift this year because Winnipeg is about to be humming with brilliant new music. In November alone, three major new recordings will be released into the world here. Several other recording projects are in the works and a few recent ones already out […]

Though he’s only seventeen, you may have encountered Connor Derraugh on a public stage by now. He might be at the piano, he might have his alto sax in hand. He’s at The Hang every week, parents in tow, but he’s also performed on the big Lyric Theatre stage with Walle Larsson and in the […]

The 2012-13 Asper series began this September with a tribute to Dizzy Gillespie. The band was fantastic, and made up mostly of people who have been to Winnipeg before—Marcus Printup on trumpet, Gary Smulyan on baritone saxophone, Ed Simon on piano, and Winnipeg’s own Steve Kirby on the bass. The drummer was the only newcomer: […]

In his book, The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans, Ned Sublette says, “If you’ve never been on a second line, there’s something about jazz you don’t know.” The second line became very apparent to me this summer when I was in New Orleans with Habitat for Humanity, rebuilding homes damaged by […]

The jazz world as we know it today has entered a state of transition, evolving from a period centered around tradition, lineage and the western notion of “logos” (akin to the artistic modernity of the early twentieth century), to a state of post-modernism, intertextuality, the immediate globalization of knowledge, and a constantly developing avant-garde. We […]

Seems we’re in a time of particular upheaval in the cultural community. Changing technology and changing attitudes are dramatically rewriting the arts, especially those connected with writing and music, and they’re certainly changing the ways we share information and opinion. All of us are scrambling to adjust. New options open up as old options collapse. […]