Features

The Ken Page Memorial Trust will hold its 17th Annual Jazz Fundraiser on Thursday, October 22 at the Old Mill in Toronto. This autumn jazz bash has become a local institution and as ever, will be conducted along the lines of a jazz party, combining some of the best American mainstream jazz artists with a cadre of Toronto’s elite musicians in an informal, but musical, jam-session format. The lineup of prodigious talent promises a jazz banquet and plenty of interaction between players of like instruments. The trumpeters will be Warren Vaché, one of the most lyrically inventive cornetists in jazz, Guido Basso and his sophisticated and mellifluous flugelhorn artistry and John MacLeod, who favours the cornet and is equally well-versed in traditional and modern jazz styles.

The recent funeral service for Marion Aitken (1935 - 2015), the late wife of New Music Concerts’ artistic director Robert Aitken, brought back sharply into my mind the world premiere performance of Harry Somers’ Dickinson, which I recorded with New Music Concerts in 1975 for broadcast on the CBC Radio program Music of Today (1966–1977).Zen, Yeats and Emily Dickinson was one of the earliest works commissioned by New Music Concerts and the new work featured Marion, as a member of the Lyric Arts Trio, together with husband Robert and soprano Mary Morrison. The Aitken family chose to play Marion’s extended piano solo from this work among the many pieces shared at her funeral service, and hearing her brought back a flood of memories from the 1970s and 1980s.

The historic trade routes collectively referred to as the Silk Road, an interconnected web of maritime and overland pathways,  have, for centuries, served as sites for cultural, economic, educational, religious – and purely musical – exchanges. In that light, “silk roads” can be seen as a significant factor in the development of the ever-evolving hybridities that have shaped the face of the modern musical world.

In 1998 the Grammy Award-winning cellist Yo-Yo Ma proposed “Silkroad” as the name of his new non-profit organisation. That project, inspired by his global curiosity and eagerness to forge connections across cultures, disciplines and generations, has grown several branches, the first of which was the successful music performing group, Silk Road Ensemble (SRE). It has played to sold-out houses at Roy Thomson Hall in 2003 and 2009 and will return to perform at Massey Hall on September 15. (Serendipitously, Toronto audiences will have another opportunity to see the SRE up close this September. Morgan Neville’s feature-length documentary The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble graces TIFF’s red carpet, enjoying its world premiere.)

Wu Man’s view from the pipa. Chinese-born Grammy Award nominee Wu Man, widely hailed as the world’s premier pipa (Chinese lute) virtuoso, has a unique perspective on the SRE’s career. An educator, composer and an ambassador of Chinese music, she has a prolific discography of 40 albums and counting. She was among the first musicians to get the call from Yo-Yo Ma to help in founding SRE.

To The WholeNote magazine, ..

How I met my teacher

As I sat thinking what I had accomplished on my clarinet, I realized I was just spinning my wheels – not going anywhere. I was playing in my comfort zone and in my tempo zone. I was 81 years of age and wanted to improve. But how? I had no idea” 

One day as I was reading The WholeNote magazine – the best source of what’s happening in the local music scene - I spotted an advertisement for music lessons on clarinet, saxophone and flute. The teacher’s name is Michele Jacot. “Well,” I said to myself, “why not - let’s talk” and we did. I have had other teachers over the many years, but none – and I mean none – were more knowledgeable than Michele Jacot.