These are exciting times in the Jazz Capital of Canada. We’re welcoming two world-class players to our city—saxophonist Jimmy Greene and pianist George Colligan are settling in with their families to live and work in our city. Both are highly sought-after musicians who bring a lot of energy and expertise to the Jazz Studies program at the U of M. When you catch them in performance, you’ll know what the fuss is all about! Their presence is adding to the ripple effect we’re creating across this country. The U of M has become a viable option for studying jazz in Canada, and the city is now known far and wide as a place where jazz is really happening.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: jazz is thriving here because it is about community-building, and the concept of community is what shapes this multi-cultural city.

Jazz is the first real world music. It was created in New Orleans about a hundred ago when a lot of people from a lot of different races refused to segregate. The one thing they had in common was a love for one another’s music. Klezmer musicians were mixing with Delta blues musicians who were mixing with marching band musicians that had a love for ragtime. These musicians loved one another’s music so much that they risked persecution by the legal authorities just to learn more about each other and to play together. That spark opened the door to the success of the North American social experiment.

The whole jazz performance process is an exercise in community-building—at any given moment, any member in the group can emerge as the leader or fall back into a supporting role. The group’s wit and intelligence largely depends on the willingness of the individuals to cooperate. The amount of varied experiences that each individual brings to the table contributes to the richness and uniqueness of the group’s sound—just like in any conventional community. A neighborhood is only as good as the people that live in it.

The spirit of jazz is tolerance. The heart of jazz is tolerance. The benefit of jazz is tolerance. The more cultures introduced within a jazz performance, the more potential it has to be exciting. Nowadays, some of the most interesting jazz music is coming from countries like Israel, India, Argentina and Africa.

The jazz process promotes listening to one another, engaging one another, debating one another, and in the end presenting a sound that identifies the whole group as a singular personality. Individual players offer individual commentary but in the context of intense listening and understanding. That interaction is a perfect metaphor for a healthy community.

Another class of talented young ambassadors has graduated from the U of M Jazz Studies program, another Summer Jazz Camp has come to pass, another season of Jazz on Wheels has come and gone. A new term is beginning for young players at the U of M and the Monday Night Hang is back in place. A lot of small moves can create a huge effect—they feel us out there! In a crazy, crazy world, the spirit of tolerance and community is right here in Winnipeg, a place I am proud to call my home.

As the fall terms starts, we’re welcoming yet another heavy-hitter to the Jazz Studies faculty at the U of M. George Colligan is a first-call New York pianist who’s playing on the some of the highest-profile gigs out there. He’s been recording and touring with Buster Williams, the Mingus Dynasty, Cassandra Wilson, Lonnie Plaxico, and Vanessa Rubin. He’s the arranger and co-leader of The Herbie Hancock Project, with Buster Williams, Lenny White, Steve Wilson, and others. He has performed with his own trio since 1989, his own quartet since 2001, and with George Colligan and Mad Science since 2000.

His list of recordings is longer than my arm. He has 18 now as a leader, starting with Activism in 1996 and The Newcomer in 1997, and piling up until we hit Blood Pressure in 2006 and Runaway in 2008. Many of those showcase really great originals. He’s a very busy sideman as well, averaging something like half a dozen recordings a year over the past decade. That list reads like a who’s who on the jazz scene, and shows his tremendous musical range and versatility.

George Colligan brings his experience and passion to classrooms and coaching situations too. He’s been in demand as a teacher and clinician all over the US and in many countries around the world since the mid-90s. He comes to Winnipeg from New York’s prestigious Juilliard Jazz Faculty where he’s been teaching for the past couple of years.

There are many things to like about George’s playing. He’s got a lot of modern language, a lot of rhythmic variety. He can go from modern to classic playing, within context, in moments. He’s got a huge amount of wit too, very sharp. If musicians were elements, he’d most certainly be fire, and of the highest degree.

When I had a chance to play with him when he was here in June, what struck me most was the sensitivity of his interactions. Very few pianists, even high-level players, really know how to support a bass player during a solo. Colligan has it down to a science. He can basically hold together the structure without looking like he’s taking over the bass, and you have room to breathe without the form getting ugly. He creates a cushion of sound when he’s comping, and his attention doesn’t waver. That kind of sensitivity speaks of a big spirit.

He’s multi-talented—he’s a strong trumpet player and a good drummer too. After a long interview day, he joined us at The Hang, and at the end of the evening, when a bunch of young musicians who were finally getting their chance to play, George sat in on drums. The bass player was struggling to figure out his notes, and George was so attentive and patient that he turned those efforts into real music. He nurtured that thing until it was something quite wonderful, and all those musicians walked off the stage feeling accomplished. That kind of spirit in a musician, whether it’s a piano player, a bass player, a singer, or a sax player, is rare.

George Colligan comes to the Jazz Studies program with an incredible performance pedigree, a lot of talent and acclaim as a composer/arranger, a strong academic background in performance and music education, and so much fire. If he’s not a genius I don’t know who is. Take a minute to search him out, hear the way he tears up the keyboard—and welcome him to the Jazz Capital of Canada.

The mark of a savvy performer and master of their craft is often better felt than explained—it’s a total experience of thought, sound, and feeling. If tenor saxophonist Houston Person can pull that off through his recordings, his live performance will have us thinking, hearing and feeling long after his visit to Winnipeg this fall.

Growing up with music likely influenced Person’s decision to follow his passion and study music at the South Carolina State College, then later at the Hartt School of Music. He first made his mark on the professional music scene in the 1970s, specializing in gospel, R&B, and of course disco. His style is most often called soul jazz, with occasional forays into acid jazz.

Some of his influences were Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, Hank Mobley and most significantly Illinois Jacquet. Another major figure for the bluesy tenor player was Johnny “Hammond” Smith—they played together a lot in the mid 1960s. Since that time, organ players have been a staple for Houston’s own music and sound.

Houston’s large body of work spans decades and is a treat for any listener to swim through, but a few notables might help you prepare for the real live thing. His latest solo album, The Art and Soul of Houston Person, was released in 2008. If you’re looking for a duo pairing, bassist Ron Carter joins Person for Sometime in Common (1989). Classic standards are everywhere throughout his recordings, and some of his beautiful ballad work can be heard on My Romance (1998) and To Etta with Love (2004), a tribute to his long time friend and musical partner, the late Etta Jones.

To add to my personal collection, I picked up Legends of Acid Jazz, a reissue of Houston Express and Person to Person!, two of his most funky and popular albums from the 1970s. Across all of the tracks, Person presents a very confident and self-assured persona. He knows what he wants his music to be, and he knows how to share it so you know it’s him but are still curious to hear what he has to say. His R&B, soul and blues vibe is definitely dominant, but it is easy to hear he has skills in many musical styles. The bebop lines that come out of his horn are clear and swinging, his softer sub tone approach is something you’d hear from Coleman Hawkins or Paul Gonsalves. And his fingers are fast! No note value is left behind as he covers them all seemingly with ease and no second thoughts. The harmonies are easy to listen to and the groove is hard to lose.

Another attractive quality? Houston Person knows how to make you feel a certain way. Whether it’s a sensual serenade or a front burner blues, he can set the mood.

As a saxophone player myself, I’m drawn to his sound. He plays from his core. He pulls his music from a very deep and powerful place within himself. He has the ideal edgy soul sound, a hard driving definition with a hint of forbidden sass. He reminds us that the saxophone is an instrument like no other. With the popular appeal of an electric guitar, the preaching power of a lead singer and all the rhythm a drummer can create, the saxophone can say it all, sounding one note at a time. It is the responsibility of the player to make the horn sound good, and Houston has that down to an art.

When Houston Person visited in Winnipeg in 2007, he quickly became a favorite as both a performer and a teacher. Now he’s coming back to remind us all about keeping it bluesy, basic, and beautiful.

Gerald Clayton is one of those fortunate few musicians who come from jazz royalty. If there is such a thing as an American griot, Gerald would be one: his musicality reaches back generations, and that allows him to speak with such a deep knowledge and sensitivity to the tradition.

It’s hard to talk about Gerald without talking about his father, John, one of the world’s finest bass players and a protégé of Ray Brown—with these guys you’re touching on the top studio musicians in LA, some of the top musicians in the world. John was also the conductor of the Netherlands Symphony Orchestra, the president of the International Society of Bass Players, and is one of the most sought-after clinicians in the world. His brother Jeff is a first-call jazz saxophonist, and their father before them was an accomplished musician as well.

The point is that Gerald, growing up, has had access to tons of street education in this art form, and tons of formal education as well. Whereas some children of famous artists never quite establish themselves in their own right, that isn’t the case with Gerald: he’s the spitting image of his father, except that he sits at a piano.

You can hear the influence of Gerald’s upbringing in his playing. He has a confident and well-produced hard bop sound, with lots of blues inflections. Afro-Cuban and Brazilian stylings are part of his lexicon as well. He was a kid when Wynton Marsalis became a big star, so he can call on the more modern avant-garde language. Because he’s young, he also has rhythmic elements of the hip hop world too. He can call on all those elements, and move through them in ways that are unique and compelling. He’s playing with a lot of important musicians right now—from Houston Person to Roy Hargrove to the Mingus Big Band. Everybody’s got their arms open for this young player, and he goes where he wants, not because of his heritage, but because he’s an important voice in jazz piano.

A couple of seasons ago, Gerald Clayton shared the stage with his dad and his uncle Jeff, and Winnipeg audiences heard in him a mature player, an accomplished composer, and a charming performer. Don’t miss him when he returns this fall. He’s on a fast trajectory—straight up!

If you’ve been out to jazz concerts in Winnipeg, no doubt you’ll have run into Amber Epp. She’s a force of nature on the stage, whether she’s doing jazz or blues or revamped standards with her regular band, or crooning in Portuguese or Spanish on one of her Latin gigs, or hopping up to jam with a band that didn’t exist a moment ago. She has a powerful voice, an infectious grin, and talent to burn. This past May, she graduated with a Bachelor of Jazz Studies from the U of Manitoba, winning the Gold Medal, the Faculty’s highest honor.

How did you get into singing jazz?

In my last year of high school, I started listening to some of the traditional jazz singers—Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra. Then for my 18th birthday, my parents took me to the Monday Night Hang at The Freehouse. Alvin Atkinson was there playing drums with his elbows, and Steve Kirby and Larry Roy and Will Bonness. I was hooked! After that, I was always phoning my friends in Steinbach or bugging my parents to drive me in.

Eventually I got up my nerve to get up on stage. I sang “Lullaby of Birdland”—and it was really, really terrible! But I knew I had to try it again. I’ve learned many times that The Hang is the best place to fall on your face. It’s better to work stuff out there than in a concert!

That fall, I entered the Jazz Studies program at the U of M—and now, four years later, I’m done! I was so excited the first time Steve invited me up to sing with the house band at The Hang. Now I find myself hosting The Hang and singing all over the place.

You’ve been schooled in the classroom and schooled on stage. How do they go together for you?

I can’t really see having one without the other. I didn’t grow up surrounded by this music (Steinbach is the Choral Capital not the Jazz Capital), so university helped me make up a lot of ground. You’re there to study, practice, take lessons, ask questions. It’s motivating to be surrounded by people with a similar mindset. (That person knows more tunes than me? Well, not for long!) Also, you meet people who’ll be part of your musical life for a long time.

At the same time, I’ve learned just as much from live performances as I have in school. Right from the start I have gone out to every single thing I could, and I sit in whenever I can. I have seen my mentors on stage, so I know that performing is their passion too—they’ve basically been coerced into teaching! Being out there is where the energy is. I try to put myself in as many different situations as possible, and then just go for it. I certainly don’t intend to stop learning now that I’ve got my degree!

Did that attitude get you hooked on Latin music?

I had met the Papa Mambo crew at The Hang in my first year, but I got the Latin bug a couple of years later when I heard the Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto on a Stan Getz recording. In an odd coincidence, I met Marco Castillo at practically the same time. After that, I literally started following these guys around, asking them to recommend songs. I got claves and shakers, and much to the annoyance of my roommates, practiced my güiro in the basement. Then I’d hop up and join them whenever they’d let me.

Now I do about as much Latin as straight-ahead jazz. I love the spirit of the music and the people—so much so that I’m going to spend three months this winter studying in Cuba. You’d be shocked to know how many different kinds of Latin rhythms come from there! Since I want to know everything I can about this music, I’m going right to the source…

Lewis Nash is hands down one of the most important drummers alive today. He’s been first-call for many of jazz’s top artists for over two decades, from his first tours with Betty Carter to his most recent work as a member of The Blue Note Seven. Legendary bassist Ron Carter recently said, “I’ve turned down gigs because Lewis wasn’t on them.” Winnipeggers will be glad to see Lewis again—he has been on the Asper series stage twice now, and will be back in September to perform with Gerald Clayton, Houston Person, and our very own Steve Kirby. I had a chance to catch up with Lewis in July at the Montreal Jazz Festival.

I’ve heard people say that you play like you have ESP. How do you develop that?

To communicate and play music on a high level, you have to be fully present in the moment the music is being created. When you’re completely tuned in, you’re hearing everything that’s going on, musically or non-musically. Body language, sound, movement, all these things come into play. While listening, you realize how many choices and options you have all the time—from beat to beat, from section to section of a song.

So what people think of as ESP or intuition can be learned and developed by being present and paying attention to these interactions. It’s a lot like life. People tend to go through a day in habitual mode. They’ll watch TV or fix something to eat or do the dishes and not really be fully present to whatever they’re doing. Awareness is something you can choose to develop.

With improvisational music there’s always an element of not knowing what’s coming next. I like to make an analogy with sports. At the beginning of the game, no one knows what the plays will be, what the score will be or who will win. That’s how it is with jazz: the audience might be familiar with the tunes, but not even the players know the direction the music will go or who will play a great solo. The beauty of improvisation is that you don’t know. From night to night, even if you play the same songs, they’re always different.

What things have helped you achieve your level of success?

Determination, patience, and commitment. Daring—you’ve got to be brave enough to try stuff and see what happens. Take gigs with music that you know is hard, and learn it. You have to put yourself in situations that force you to grow. Growth builds confidence. As you do more varied things, you won’t be filled with trepidation the next time someone calls you for something that’s musically challenging.

What have you noticed about younger drummers?

I will say this: they don’t need more ability to get around the instrument! What they need is the ability to communicate with people through their music. Sometimes a young musician has it, but more often it takes some years to live life and learn how to communicate. I hear many young musicians who aren’t sure what to put where, or with how much emphasis—you have to learn what to leave out and what to keep in.

Many young musicians are very talented and have lots of potential, but they are so often caught up in being on the cutting edge and trying not to sound like someone who came before them. If you want to be a great jazz musician, you can’t avoid Bird, Dizzy, Art Tatum, Louis Armstrong, Oscar Peterson, Horace Silver—it’s impossible! I don’t know why people want to call themselves jazz musicians if they don’t have any elements of that in their music. Just call yourself an improvising musician.

I appreciate a lot of the musics of the world which have nothing to do with jazz. I appreciate musicianship, I appreciate skill on an instrument, I appreciate a beautiful sound, I appreciate the ability to touch others through a voice or instrument. What is an issue with me is when people say they want to play jazz, but they don’t want to listen to Coleman Hawkins or Bird. It’s almost like dissing your grandparents: without them your parents wouldn’t be here, and without them you wouldn’t be here!

Dealing with the history doesn’t mean being less creative or playing like someone else. If you understand and value the language, the history, and what made the music what it is, then when you play, even if you write all original music, you will bring a reverence for the essence of this music and a certain sensibility which will inform all of your composing and playing.

Some of the things that people call clichés are like sayings passed down from generation to generation as part of the tradition. For me, the way that Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Philly Joe Jones and Roy Haynes established what the drumset does—that really influenced the direction of the music, not just the drums.

I enjoy playing this music. My main focus isn’t necessarily on doing something brand new. You don’t just say, “Now I am going to innovate!” That just happens naturally, as part of a continuum.

Bill “Count” Basie was one of the great leaders in jazz and played one of its biggest instruments, his orchestra. Basie’s big band played so tightly, soloed so imaginatively, and swung so hard it sounded like a small ensemble.

Bill Basie was discovered in Kansas City, but he was born in Red Band, New Jersey, where his mother taught him to play the piano as a child. He was influenced by the early stride piano work of James P Johnson and Fats Waller. While working as a vaudeville pianist he became stranded in Kansas City and started playing in a movie theatre. In 1928, he joined Walter Page’s Blue Devils and later played with the Benny Moten band. Basie formed his own group, the Barons of Rhythm, in 1935, after Moten died, and recruited some of the best players from Moten’s band, including Lester Young on sax, vocalist Jimmy Rushing, and trumpet player Oran “Hot Lips” Page.

One night while they were doing a live radio broadcast, jazz producer John Hammond heard them on his car radio in Chicago. It turned out to be a fortuitous audition. Hammond liked what he heard and after seeing Basie live in Kansas City signed him to a recording deal.

It was also on a live broadcast that Basie acquired the nickname Count. One night the host called Basie over to the microphone and said Bill was kind of an ordinary name and now that there was an Earl (Hines) and a Duke (Ellington), wasn’t it time to elevate him to Count? The nickname stuck.

The blues and swing were the foundation the Basie band was built upon. Basie had driving, hard-hitting brass and a swinging rhythm section. He created an environment that encouraged growth and allowed individuality to flourish. Many of his players were great soloists, and many went on to careers outside of the Basie band. He was tough when required and conducted his group from the piano bench by gesturing with his eyes, nodding his head, and pointing a finger.

One of the staples of the Basie library is April in Paris [Verve #3145214022]. The album was recorded in two separate sessions in December 1955 and January 1956, when the band was playing regularly at New York’s Birdland. From these dates came three important songs that helped to revitalize the Basie orchestra and in the process became jazz standards.

Vernon Duke’s “April in Paris” came from the 1932 musical Walk a Little Faster. Basie’s version is the most famous, and it climbed to number twenty-eight on the pop charts in 1956. The public loved it, in particular Thad Jones’s trumpet’s quotes from “Pop Goes the Weasel” and the false ending where Basie says, “One more time.” It is this performance of “April in Paris” that was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1985.

“Corner Pocket” was co-written by Basie’s long-time guitarist Freddie Green. (After Jon Hendricks wrote lyrics to it, it became “Until I Met You.”) The song features an arrangement written by Ernie Wilkins that has the trumpets of Thad Joes and Joe Newman coming in strong after a brisk introduction by Basie on piano. Saxophonist Frank Foster’s “Shiny Stockings” is a compositional masterpiece, and the band plays it in a hard-blowing jazz mood.

One of the reasons this album is so good is that Basie kept it simple and swinging. He came from the less-is-best school of playing. He could pop the right note when the band was taking a breath. Basie played short lines with his right hand, with occasional punctuations by his left hand, while guitar and bass provided the rhythm functions normally played by the left hand. Freddie Green, on acoustic guitar, was a masterful rhythm guitarist and time-keeper. Drummer Sonny Payne was an innovator who laid out the time with wire brushes on a high-hat cymbal and worked the bass drum softly.

This is great big band music, and April in Paris is a high-water mark for Basie and his sixteen-piece orchestra. This is a big band at the top of its game.

The Jazz on Wheels band has been sharing the joy around the city this summer. And joy it is—winding parades of red t-shirted kids rattling homemade shakers, impromptu dancing along the sidelines, crowds of kids throwing down the gauntlet with spectacular jungle roars, all powered by great music played right out in the open.

The band is primarily students this year, and they’ve taken to these open-air musical concert-parties with the perfect mix of serious musicianship and playful enthusiasm. Their repertoire includes dance music and cartoon music and remakes of familiar tunes. They improvise funny stories with only their instruments for voices. Most of all, they are open and comfortable and clearly enjoying themselves—the ideal combination to entice kids and adults alike who don’t have a lot of experience of this kind of music-making.

Steve Kirby is more of a presenter than a performer this year, having given up the bass post (mostly) in favor of ground-level hosting. By all indications, it’s working—he seems to be having as much fun as the hordes of kids who are teaching him their new dance moves or grabbing the available rhythm sticks or sidling up to get near the microphone.

Jazz on Wheels ends the outdoor season at the Sherbrook Street Fair on September 12, just after school gets underway for another year. In the months ahead, members of the band will take the next big step—connecting with some of these interested kids to help them develop basic musical skills themselves. Exciting times!

In August, I squeezed into a packed house at The Hang to soak up the incredible musicianship of the Jazz Camp faculty band. At one point, Jimmy Greene was taking a solo, the band solid bedrock under him. His big tenor sax sound was rocketing around the room, muscular and searching and clear as honey. Suddenly he was way up in the highest register of the horn. There’s a pinch up there, an ache in the sound that tore right through me and illuminated everything—the performers in their various roles, the musical maneuvering that had led them there, the brilliance of this art form.

What grabbed me in Jimmy’s solo was not the sweetness or agility, but that sudden eruption of something gritty, elemental, unrestrained. It was a perfect example of the thing that happens in all kinds of art—the juncture between expectation and surprise, when our own work as listeners or readers or viewers is up-ended and we’re given something we didn’t know we were waiting for until we felt it there, shocking and wonderful.

It set me thinking about my own ongoing dialogue with perfectionism. Most of us who practice the arts train for years to refine and polish and contain our outbursts, channeling them through words or color or sound or movement. It’s a huge discipline, and if the effort is genuine and well-directed, we do arrive at a level of competence that allows for beautiful gestures that are intentional rather than accidental.

Still, in this increasingly mediated world where we can edit photographs and design documents on our laptops, I sometimes wonder if we are seduced by a kind of perfection that is characteristic of machines rather than humans. Machines can do a lot of things, but they can’t think for themselves and they can’t respond—think of the last time a recorded voice called to sell you a cruise or a credit card with a lower interest rate.

Listening to a great jazz musician is a lesson in balancing the desire for machine-like precision with a commitment to human expression and its almost unfathomable range of emotion, inflection, intention. To catch that range, both artists and their audiences have to welcome shifts that are startling and sudden and spontaneous. Those moments are where the wonder lives.

The French critic Roland Barthes celebrated what he called “the grain of the voice,” a certain quality in writing and other art forms that is distinctive and memorable and absolutely particular. When you can feel the specific character of a voice, you know an actual person has offered you something, and that you’ve found a way to receive it.

Jimmy and the rest of the band offered us the grain of their voices, a quality that is raw and personal and undeniably real. They offered it with generosity, and gave each of us in that crowded room a chance to feel just a little more hooked into this human family.