Huizinga with Marc Destrubé, violin, Keith Hamm, viola and Judy Hereish, cello in Owen Sound. photo by John WhiteTwo leisurely phone calls – well an old-fashioned phone call and a zoom chat, to be precise – bracket this story. The phone call, bright and early on the morning of Saturday  Sep 19, was with violinist/composer Edwin Huizinga, calling from Owen Sound, where the 16th annual Sweetwater Festival (Huizinga’s first as artistic director) was well under way. The zoom chat, just three days later, was also bright and early with Huizinga again, this time alongside singer Measha Brueggergosman, at a table inside Brueggergosman’s Halifax home, a kitchen behind them, and post-tropical storm Teddy, his career as hurricane having been cancelled ahead of his Maritime tour, whipping aimlessly at the trees outside. 

I’d been wanting to talk to Huizinga and Brueggergosman for a while about their current collaboration, but had been expecting to have to speak with each of them separately, so it was an unexpected bonus to find out, part way through the Saturday call with Huizinga, that he would be flying to Nova Scotia on the Monday “to finish a project with our amazing fearless Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman.” 

Read more: Anatomy of a Collaboration: Edwin Huizinga and Measha Brueggergosman

Svetlana Lunkina in The Dreamers Ever Leave You, National Ballet of Canada. Photo by Karolina KurasIn these still surreal times defined by restrictions, we are all increasingly hungry for live performance. With opera and theatre still considered too dangerous or problematic to bring back quite yet,dance has begun to return, although to unusual venues. 

The Canadian Stage Company, for example, has opened their stage in the heart of High Park – which has stayed empty of its usual Shakespearean performances this summer – for three exciting weekends of dance performances. Week One: September 26 and 27, Solo in High Park featured some of the city’s top soloists in a variety of styles from tap to flamenco, house, and contemporary. Week Two: Dusk Dances,October 3 and 4, featuring the work of three Dusk Dances contemporary choreographers, and Week Three: Red Sky, October 9 to 11, showcasing the thrilling physical style of this Dora Award-winning Indigenous company.

And while the National Ballet of Canada has had to cancel their usual fall season at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts – including perennial holiday favourite The Nutcracker – they too are making more experimental appearances, at both Harbourfront Centre and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Harbourfront’s Brigantine Room will welcome physically distanced audiences to live performances of Robert Binet’s Group of Seven-inspired, The Dreamers Ever Leave You, October 9 to 17; and at AGO Live on October 22 and 23, audiences will get to take an even closer look at the creative process as they are invited into Walker Court to observe open rehearsals of a newly commissioned work by Kevin A. Ormsby. 

For both these companies, there will doubtless be other unusual excursions to write about in the months ahead, but right now, at Harbourfront and at several venues around the city, it’s the sixth edition of FFDN. 

Read more: A Time to Fall for Dance

Photo by Aldo OlijrhookFrom an early age, I was quick to realize that there were not (m)any other young Black pianists who were learning how to play classical music – at least that I had ever met. I was around seven years old at elementary school when I was first introduced to the instrument; at that point I was already able to play some of the choir music and other popular tunes that the school’s music teacher, Mr. Gibson, had taught us. After receiving significant encouragement from Mr. Gibson and others who had heard me play for fun, my parents decided to purchase a piano and enroll me in piano lessons. At the time, none of us had any idea or preference of what style of music I would – or should – learn in these lessons.

Fast forward a couple of decades and nothing has changed, really. No growth of the sport, no catering to a wider audience. So which is the chicken and which the egg? i.e. Is there a lack of interest in classical music within the Black community because it is so underrepresented at the highest levels/”misunderstood music”/etc., or is the lack of representation yet another form of systemic discouragement towards some groups of society? 

I was first introduced to classical music in my earliest piano lessons, and have always loved everything the genre has to offer – a seemingly endless expanse of amazing music spanning hundreds of years, providing those who choose to play it a parallel range of technical, musical and ideological challenges. My appreciation fully blossomed after my first classical recital at the Polish Consulate in Toronto, and has never diminished. No matter how many hours of practice, there will always be more work to do and new heights to reach. Delving into the diverse works of J.S. Bach and Domenico Scarlatti could by themselves cost a lifetime of exploration, let alone engaging into the oeuvres of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms and beyond. As “musically gifted” as I was told I was when I was young, there were so many other pianists who seemed to be light years ahead of what I thought I could ever achieve. My goal became to improve and become the best version of my musical self that I could be.

Read more: Reflections: Life as a “Classical Unicorn”

Brott Opera’s Don GiovanniBrott Opera’s Don GiovanniIt was a phone call from Hamilton, from Boris Brott, that put me on the trail of this story. Brott is indefatigable: between May 2 and August 13 the Brott Music Festival offered up 18 online productions, none more intriguing than their virtual Don Giovanni which aired, on Facebook, on July 30 and remains available at brottmusic.com. “You should watch it,” Brott said, so I did. Half way through I was hooked and called him back with questions. “You should talk to Anna [Theodosakis],” he said. So I did.

What follows is a highly condensed version of a half-hour telephone chat. 

Read more: Opera Squared: Anna Theodosakis on Brott Opera’s Don Giovanni

bannerL to R: First pressing of "Livery Stable Blues" by ODJB, 1917; sheet music for the ODJB version under the alternate title "Barnyard Blues", from 1917, and a 1998 “Giants of Jazz” re-release of Ellington’s 1929 recording.As a first-year undergraduate at Capilano University’s Jazz Studies program in 2005, I, like the rest of my cohort, was automatically enrolled in a mandatory jazz history course. It was a survey course, designed to teach us how to listen actively, to distinguish between Armstrong and Parker and Coltrane, and to develop a sense of the historical arc of jazz in the 20th century. Our very first listening example was Livery Stable Blues, by the Original Dixieland Jass Band. 

Something of a novelty song, its name derived from the horns’ imitation of animal sounds in stop-time sections, Livery Stable Blues has the distinction of being the very first jazz recording, released by New York’s Victor record label in 1917. It also holds a more dubious distinction: all five members of the ODJB, who billed themselves as the “creators of jazz,” were white. 

To his credit, our instructor mentioned this unexpected fact, though we, as a class, did not investigate it further. There was much we could have considered: the circumstances behind the recording, the tricky concept of artistic ownership, the way in which Black American Music gets repackaged by white performers – from the ODJB to Elvis Presley to Justin Bieber – and profitably sold to white audiences. But we didn’t; instead, we moved on to the next song, and focused on learning to correctly identify excerpts for our upcoming exam. 

This experience is indicative of what is still a defining characteristic of Canadian post-secondary jazz programs: namely, that they are primarily concerned with teaching students how to be competent professional performers, and that teaching students to engage with issues of race, gender and equity within their field is outside of a program’s purview. On the surface, there’s an undeniable logic to this: students come to learn performance skills, and that’s what programs deliver. One of the unintended consequences of this outlook, however, is an erasure of the lived experiences of jazz’s canonical figures, the vast majority of whom are Black. 

Read more: Back to the Future: The Struggle for Equity in Jazz Studies programs
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