Many of you will remember a time, roughly ten years ago, when the Cool Monday Night Hang had just started in Osborne Village. At that point, there were several small conclaves of highly proficient jazz musicians here who really had a lot going on, despite the perception that jazz wasn’t a big deal here. So […]

In our time, when so many of our loved “professors of piano” are no longer with us—we have no Oscar Peterson, no Tommy Flanagan, no Hank Jones—only a handful of players are filling that void. Bill Charlap is one of that select group, a sort of hybrid of Bill Evans and Red Garland. He’s a […]

If your only conception of jazz clarinet is Benny Goodman and his cohorts from the Swing Era, keep thinking. Since 1942 or so, the instrument has matured into one as compelling as any other in the hands of the right musician. Anat Cohen is that right musician. She reminds us that the clarinet is rich […]

The Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra is heading east for their next concert, “1001 Arabian Jazz Nights.” Of course, jazz musicians have long been attracted to the exotic sounds and rhythms of other musical cultures—think of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Night in Tunisia,” recorded first in 1942 and still one of the most-loved jazz standards. For this concert, the […]

Saxophonist Greg Gatien grew up in Halifax, and after receiving his undergraduate degree at St Francis Xavier, he headed south to Boston and Rochester to study and teach. For the past few years, he has been on faculty at Brandon University, sharing his love of jazz and his passion for teaching. He also directs the […]

To the general public, a seventeen-year-old kid who is genuinely enthused and inspired about this thing called jazz may be a strange and confusing phenomenon. Perhaps it’s the fact that jazz musicians don’t study through a widely-recognized conservatory—although I personally have, and for me conservatory training has no negative connotations whatsoever. Or perhaps it’s the […]

I believe that almost everything Nat King Cole recorded is, in varying degrees, worth listening to. He was the consummate professional musician with impeccable vocal delivery, and as a pianist, he was the perfect accompanist to his own singing. Cole personified musical elegance, and his warm voice inhabits all the nooks and crannies of a […]

Impressionist painters of the late 19th-century implemented pure colours, organic brush strokes, and an open visual conception to bring their canvas to life. To more accurately and effectively capture the nuance of their surroundings, these artists began to work outdoors when painting landscapes, as opposed to working in a studio. This practice is known as […]

When you look back along a timeline, you can see the critical moments that shape your life—those chance encounters with a specific person or a transformative idea. With the benefit of hindsight, you can track the almost imperceptible shifts in direction, those little surges of heat when new dreams begin to take shape. We may […]