For me, college is roughly analogous to life. During the first year of entering the student body, the stark reality of campus protocol can turn all preconceived notions about the university experience on end with a jolt.

The first thing a student discovers is Newton’s law of motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That boring kid who dresses funny, won’t hang out, and misses all the important parties winds up with a smokin’ grade point average, fat scholarships and glowing references. The opposite also applies.

Somewhere along the way, new students learn exactly what type of commitment their profession takes and are forced to question whether they really want to do this for the rest of their lives or whether they’re just trying to fulfill someone else’s dream.

There are many paths through the middle years, with about every possible outcome, and though some students find ways of extending their campus life span, the reality is that there is an end. At the point of graduation, the toughest questions present themselves:

Was my time spent wisely? Did I memorize data merely to pass tests or did I actually take the time to learn some things? Did I off-load problems or did I solve them? How will I use my new pool of knowledge? Will I find a way to help my community or just tend my own fences?

Here’s a bigger question: Is the student beginning to get a life experience or is the life getting a student experience?

I’m encouraged that the universe always sees fit to offer up big clues to small riddles like these. I’m amused that the universe doesn’t just give out any real concrete answers.

Nowadays when jazz musicians enter a performance group, whatever its size or configuration, it’s likely that they’ve had access to a wealth of refined information. Technique becomes a given—these days everybody has chops! Yet everyone doesn’t sound good, and even the ones that sound good aren’t necessarily fun to listen to.

For a jazz musician, every performance is a life metaphor played out in eight to ten minutes. A performance is about choices—what is chosen to be played, what is not chosen, and why. The end result is a reflection of the performer. Is the musician playing to show off or does he want to capture the mood of the moment for the listener? What is he sharing with the others in the band? What is he taking from the experience to the next performance?

Time on the bandstand is fleeting, university time is finite, and life is short. We come to the bandstand, play out our life stories, then we leave the bandstand and go to the next gig. When it’s all done, we’re left only with a memory of the choices we made to inspire others to support our next performance. Let’s make our next gig the best one yet.

I’m a fan of the drums and the people who play them. When I hear a song, the first thing I listen to is the drum part. I’ll watch the drummer more than anyone else in the band. Drums have the power in modern-day music, whether hard rock or country ballads, to drive and give structure to the music.

I’ve been fortunate to play with many great drummers on the jazz scene, players like Billy Hart, Bill Stewart, Lenny White, Cindy Blackman, Ralph Peterson, and Jeff “Tain” Watts. However, when I have my own gigs, my top call is Enoch Jamal Strickland. EJ has been touring with me for the past 3 years, and he’s on two of my CDs. I’m lucky to have him at all since he is kept very busy by Ravi Coltrane—he is in high demand from many other players, including his twin brother Marcus and Cassandra Wilson. EJ Strickland impresses me because he is so consistent as a time-keeper, but also such an expressive interpreter. Jazz drumming is so much about interpretation, and EJ has excellent instincts as well as a musical maturity that is surprising for a musician who is just 30 years old.

EJ is also becoming a great composer and bandleader—his debut, In This Day, was released in 2009, and has been getting great reviews. He’s also a sensitive teacher. His two-week residency at the University of Manitoba this past fall gave local students an opportunity to be inspired by EJ’s dedication to the craft of jazz drumming. He returns for a couple of weeks this January to continue that work.

During our European tour in November, I sat down with EJ to talk about his musical life.

Who are your earliest musical influences?

My first influence is my father. He’s the one who introduced me to jazz—and music in general. John Coltrane’s quartet with Elvin Jones is the first jazz I ever heard and is probably my strongest influence. Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, Charlie Parker, The Jazz Crusaders, and Led Zeppelin are some others that I heard early on.

What do you think about when playing with other musicians?

I always think about how I can support the sound of the band. I want to do my best to orchestrate the mood, the feel, and the transitions, based on the music I hear back from my fellow musicians. I feel that ideas don’t need to be searched for—they’re already there on the bandstand. You can draw from a melody, a form, a solo, the piano accompaniment, bass lines, everybody’s dynamic levels, everybody’s feel. I guess what I listen for the most is what my role is in the music.

Can you describe your approach to composition?

I try my best to find a different means of inspiration every time I write a new composition. I have written tunes based on drum grooves, poems, melody, chord progressions, or musical feels like bossa, swing, fusion, etc. Every piece has its own path.

How did you develop your practice ethics? Are you able to maintain your daily practice routine even as a touring artist?

I developed my practice ethics from being overwhelmed with information. There are seven days in a week, so I work on seven different things every week. Practicing everything in one day has proven unsuccessful for me, but I find a day’s worth of concentration in one specific area goes a long way. 

Being on tour is the perfect opportunity to concentrate on technique. Most of the time I don’t have access to a drum set, so I bring a lightweight snare-drum stand and a practice pad. A pillow is a great way to develop speed and is also silent. Being a drummer, there is no excuse for not practicing because you can practice any time of the day.

What advice would you give to a serious young musician?

Practice, practice, practice! Study, study, study! This also means listening to a lot of music! I truly believe this statement: “Take care of the music, and the music will take care of you.”

Drumheller is Toronto jazz quintet—or, in their words, “a collective of individual composers”—which pushes boundaries in some seriously playful ways. They are rooted in the jazz tradition, but they are hardly nostalgic. Now Magazine likens them to “the Dirty Dozen Brass Band with a touch of dementia.” All of them are involved in the improvisational music scene in Toronto, and they bring that to the stage, along with a passion for the jazz canon and a good smattering of folk, punk, and groove. Their performance energy is created by high level playing, collective and solo improvisation, and what one critic calls “a sense of wobbly fun.”

Working together since 2003, Drumheller’s members are an interesting bunch. Drummer Nick Fraser has performed with a host of Canadian and international jazz and free improv musicians, including Mike Murley, Anthony Braxton, and John Scofield. Critic Mike Miller suggests he is “perhaps a little too progressive for the hidebound Canadian scene” (Globe & Mail), but clearly his adventurous style is hitting the mark with both audiences and fellow musicians.

Trombonist Doug Tielli is often found in Toronto’s jazz clubs, but he’s also a prolific singer-songwriter, and a member of the post-rock band The Silt—where he sings and plays guitar, banjo, trombone, saw, and keyboards. He’s a frequent collaborator in free improv settings, and also performs experimental composed music with several groups.

Guitarist Eric Chenaux has been central to the experimental and improvised music scene in Toronto, playing with several groups, and co-founding Rat-drifting records. He has a fresh and irreverent approach to the guitar, pushing it sonically into new territory. Critics and audiences alike are drawn to the wit in his compositions and playing.

Rob Clutton, nominated for best bassist in the 2006 National Jazz Awards, composes and performs solo bass—his solo CD is Dubious Pleasures—and is a member of several groups, including his own, Cluttertones. The Globe & Mail singles out his “unbound creativity, amiability and taste.”

Saxophonist Brodie West draws on disparate influences for his particular blend of free improvisation and formal composition—if you’re sharp, you can hear traces of Ornette Coleman and Charlie Parker, Dmitri Shostakovich and The Ex.

Ornette Coleman is certainly one of the touchstones of this band; another would be Charles Mingus, also one to push past expectation rather than settle with what’s familiar. Drumheller has much in common with The Bad Plus, E.S.T., and Marco Benevento—intensity, experimentation, and sideways humour. That’s exactly what appeals to Jazz Winnipeg Producer Paul Nolin. “What I really like about the band is that they are offbeat and idiosyncratic,” he says. “Some of my favorite jazz these days is unexpected and perhaps a little less swinging in the conventional sense.”

Drumheller visits Winnipeg as part of the Jazz Innovators series, a project that Nolin is passionate about. Each year, the series brings top Canadian jazz players to Winnipeg to share their work on stag e and in masterclasses. It’s not necessarily an easy sell—jazz musicians, Canadian or otherwise, are rarely household names, and the groups coming through are still developing an audience base outside their home cities.

Nolin points to the importance of cultivating a scene for Canadian jazz talent. “If we don’t develop audiences and interest here in Winnipeg where we have one of the most exciting jazz programs in the country and where we are turning out more graduates every year, what message are we sending to the local and national community?” The Jazz Innovators series—and the Canadian program at the Jazz Winnipeg Festival in June—are an ideal way to get a taste of what’s happening in jazz across this country.

Drumheller will be bringing their particular brilliance to the Park Theatre at the end of February. Expect to be perplexed, amused, and slightly off-kilter—the perfect antidote to the winter blahs. No doubt the behind-the-scenes chatter at the afternoon masterclass will be intriguing as well.

Ron Paley hardly needs an introduction to prairie audiences—his big band has been pulling people onto dance floors since it formed in 1976. Paley, a pianist with a genuine love for big band sound and repertoire, got his start playing with the big bands of Buddy Rich and Woody Herman. He has quick hands and a kind of eager joy when he’s at the keyboard, and that sparkling energy is mirrored in the whole band.

Paley has a couple of big band recordings to his credit, and a trio album as well. He’s also made a significant impact as a composer and arranger. He’s been commissioned by Groundswell, the Winnipeg Singers, the Royal Canadian College of Organists, and the National Arts Centre. In 2004, he scored a pastiche of Rodgers and Hart songs for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s wildly successful “A Cinderella Story.” That show is currently on tour across the US and will be staged again here in Winnipeg at the beginning of May.

When the Ron Paley Big Band takes their seats at the Muriel Richardson Auditorium on January 16, they’ll be joined by Ian McDougall, another Canadian big band master. MacDougall is probably best known for his long-time position as lead trombonist for the Juno and Grammy award-winning band, Rob McConnell and The Boss Brass. He appears on more than a dozen recordings with that group—The Boss Brass Again and Brassy and Sassy feature his compositions. McDougall also founded The Brass Connection; their self-titled debut won the Juno for best jazz album in 1982.

As a young trombonist, McDougall spent a couple of years in the early 60s cutting his teeth with the John Dankworth Band in Great Britain. Back in Canada, he established a busy career as a freelance player and composer/arranger in Vancouver and Toronto. In the early 90s, he moved back to Victoria where he taught trombone, composition and jazz studies at UVic until his 2003 retirement.

He’s a respected composer, with works performed not only by his own bands, but also by the CBC Vancouver Orchestra, the Lafayette String Quartet, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Rob McConnell Tentet, and the Toronto Cantata Chorus, among others.

He continues to perform and tour. The past decade has included tours in Canada and abroad, both as a soloist and with his own groups, to Ireland, Scotland, Australia, Denmark, Holland, the USA, Germany, and England, where he directed two BBC Big Band broadcasts.

McDougall’s long list of recordings includes several as a leader. In a Sentimental Mood, a quartet recording of the gorgeous music of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington, was nominated for a Juno. His big band has just released No Passport Required, an elegant recording of McDougall originals that revisits his experiences as a young player first traveling abroad.

When Paley and McDougall join forces in January, the big band sound will be warm and wonderful—and very much alive.

How can you explain the alchemy that happens when jazz musicians are really locked in, making music together? That’s the kind of question that hums just below the surface of a jazz lab.

Throughout the year, visiting musicians borrow time from their performance schedules to unlock the door to their laboratories, and offer tours to all of us who are fascinated by this art form. Practice skills, keys to perplexing problems, thoughts about the creative process, insights into the business of jazz—whether you’re an aspiring musician or a person who’s serious about living a more creative life, jazz labs will offer a treasure or ten to take home and ponder.

The other bonus is that they’re fun. Most likely you’ll have a chance to hear a high-level musician or ensemble toss together a brilliant bit of music-making right there in front of you—and talk about what they’re doing. Often they’ll coach younger players through the process too, and you can suddenly see how even minor adjustments can move a musician to a whole new level.

As part of their TD Canada Trust Jazz Labs series, Jazz Winnipeg has booked in time with both Dave McMurdo, the big band trombonist and composer, and Drumheller, the edgy Toronto ensemble. McMurdo performs the Valentine’s show with the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra; his Jazz Lab takes place a couple of days earlier. Drumheller will be set up at the Park Theatre in the afternoon of Thursday, February 25 for their Jazz Lab—no doubt that conversation will be a great set-up for their evening show.

The Jazz Labs are an important mentoring option for musicians, both professional and amateur, but they’re also a great chance for jazz fans to connect with high-level jazz musicians from across North America in a casual setting. The $10 admission fee is nominal, considering what you take home with you. The fee is waived for students—they’re encouraged to register in advance at www.jazzwinnipeg.com.

As Jazz Winnipeg’s Executive Producer Paul Nolin puts it, “This is a great opportunity to get not only technical and/or practical business insights, but also meaningful dialogue on the creative process in general. I’m not a musician, but I invariably find inspiration at these sessions. And they’re free for students! What’s better than that?”

Jazz on Wheels got to fulfill one of its purposes on New Year’s Eve at the annual Concert for Hope and Peace, one of the most appropriate settings for an outfit like ours. We spread our message of community, love and tolerance, through music, dance and crowd participation.

The band was in great form with honours students Curtis Nowosad on drums, Shannon Kristjanson and Niall Bakkestad-Lagare on saxes, and Simon Christie on trumpet. George Colligan and I always have a great time together in the rhythm section, and Anna-Lisa Kirby was wailing on vocals. This time out, we augmented our band with a hoop dancer, Jessica McMann, for extra deep-rooted and rich flavor.

Our troupe anchored the concert, and we invited all the singers from the previous acts to join us for the “Song for Hope and Peace” which was composed for this event last year. With the audience joining in as well, everyone in the church—young and old—danced and sang in their own sweet and funky way that night. I believe we truly captured the spirit of hope, peace and community, which is a fitting way to launch us into 2010.

Charles Mingus is one of the music world’s true characters and one of its most disturbing. A demanding, even bullying band-leader, a talented composer, and an innovative bassist, Mingus helped to free the bass from its traditional supportive role in jazz and make it an instrument that people listened to.

His unpredictable, volatile personality was cause for concern for many, and at one point Mingus spent time in New York’s Bellevue psychiatric hospital. While working as a sideman in the early 1950s, he was the only musician Duke Ellington personally fired from his orchestra. When leading his own band, Mingus would sometimes stop playing mid-song to shush the audience or to berate a musician in his group for the inadequacy of his performance. During one concert, he punched trombonist Jimmy Knepper in the mouth.

Mingus Ah Um [Columbia/Legacy #CK 65512] is the pinnacle of his career. It was recorded in the spring of 1969 and boasts the premiere of several exceptional songs. The best known is the melancholy ballad “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” This is a salute to the great saxophonist Lester Young, who died seven weeks before the session. “Better Git It in Your Soul” was influenced by the church music Mingus listened to as a child in the Watts district of Los Angeles. It is a fabulous blues-gospel opus drenched with personality. The third acclaimed song that premiered on this disc is “Fables of Faubus.” It was named after Orval Faubus, the Arkansas governor who in 1957 tried to block school integration in Little Rock, until President Eisenhower sent in the National Guard. Mingus had lyrics to go with the song but because of their topical nature Columbia refused to allow them to be recorded.

Mingus had a great ear for talent. For this album, he used John Handy and Booker Ervin on saxophones, Jimmy Knepper and Willie Dennis on trombones, Danny Richmond on drums, and Horace Parlan on piano. Collectively and individually their performances are yardsticks for musicians to measure themselves against.

The first time I read a short-short story, I was stunned by how big and how small it was. These stories hardly have time to get heated up, yet they can still be smoldering in you years later.

I have been thinking lately about the arc of narrative, how it’s more like music than it might appear—its tensile strength, its ability to carry meaning and intention, its evanescence but also its persistence. In our days and in our creations, we share our long short stories—or maybe our short long stories. We tell them, we are told by them. Though they’re rarely long enough, they can be spectacularly huge.

In honor of plenitude where you least expect it, I offer you “Misterioso” by my friend John Gould, a master of this postcard fiction genre. It will give you another way of seeing Thelonious Monk. Another way of hearing him too…

You listen to his music, Monk’s music, to its broken rhythms, its dislocations, dissonances, its quips and queer silences, its harmonies that pelt down on you like handfuls of thrown pebbles, and you wonder where it all would have gone if he’d never sat down at a piano, Mr. Thelonious Sphere Monk—“Monkey” they called him as a boy—if at six years old he hadn’t started picking out tunes on those eighty-eight keys, if there hadn’t turned out to be eighty-eight at all but, say, sixty-three, or thirty-seven, or some other such number that meant to him absolutely nothing, if his little fingers hadn’t found their way amongst those eighty-eight black and white stepping stones to some hide-out, some cloister, if preachers and faith healers hadn’t suffered him to play by their sides, if his little monkey hands had been left idle in his pockets, to fidget with chestnuts and bits of string incapable of releasing any sound. What would have happened to all that weird beauty, you wonder, to those uncanny thoughts if there’d been no instrument on which to think them, and more, what would have happened to the man destined to choke on those thoughts, to be torn up by them as by a tangle of steel string snarled up in his belly, what would he have muttered to himself as he danced on what street corner bleeding to death inside, and who would have found him in what gutter, body frozen into what mute gesticulation? Was there a moment, you wonder, at which he might have missed his calling, might have turned away from the sound of his own irredeemably unique voice into some terminal silence? Was there such a moment for you? Was there something you might have found, some means, some method for getting all this passionate incoherence out of you, some instrument you failed to find or found and failed to recognize? Is it too late?

© John Gould, Kingdom of Heaven (Ekstasis, 1996)