I have a friend who is a master of ceramics. When I’m inspired, I take out the teapot that he designed and serve tea to my friends and family. The teapot is an exquisite work of art reminiscent of ancient China. It doesn’t change the taste of tea in any way but it reminds me of the importance of that particular moment and the quality of time with loved ones. It also hints at the intricacy and delicacy of social ceremony in a time long ago.

There are a lot of things in our everyday life just like that teapot—while functioning on a casual level, they offer us a peek at a higher purpose. Familiar songs from old movies and musicals are a good example. “Green Dolphin Street” and “The Days of Wine and Roses” have become classic jazz standards. These songs give us a kick like champagne and accompany us through a variety of emotional moments throughout our day.

In the hands of an inspired jazz musician, these finely-crafted songs can become high art. Check out John Coltrane’s 1961 recording of Oscar Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things” (Atlantic SD-1361). Suddenly Julie Andrews’ musings channel the longings of an African-American jazz artist in the turbulent 60s. When you hear Coltrane hit those high notes, he’s talking about some things that have been denied him, not things that he’s experienced. He’s talking about his favorite things to hope for!

For me, art is like windows and doors opening up into other rooms, other places, other times, other memories, other hearts. It reminds me that we are not the only people with the right to live, hope and dream.

In many countries where the government controls what kind of art and music the public can experience, people’s humanity seems all but forgotten. Those countries often promote a level of public brutality that is unspeakable on these pages. Women in those countries are treated like property—they aren’t even allowed an education.

I’m lucky to be in a city that’s erecting a Museum for Human Rights. What other city on the planet is doing that?

Art Blakey said, “Music washes away the dust of everyday life.” I think he’s talking about the dust that obscures our vision of our neighbors. I now have Icelandic neighbors, Jewish neighbors, British, French, and Caribbean neighbors, and more. It’s true that New York has an even larger and more diverse population than The Peg, but here, you get to know the people because they’re less defended.

I especially find indulgence and curiosity in the children. Many of the children of those disparate cultures gather every week at the Monday Night Hang. They offer you their metaphorical teacups for humanity by sharing their musical influences and their own values.

I’ve had the dust washed from my eyes many times since moving here. I can tell you firsthand, the view never ceases to inspire.

A seasoned master of the piano and a leading voice in modern jazz, Mulgrew Miller continues to advance the tradition of swinging improvised music. From stints with Art Blakey, Woody Shaw, Betty Carter and Tony Williams to recording sessions with Dave Holland and Kenny Garrett to his dozen releases as a leader, Miller consistently delights listeners by creating beautiful music that dances.

Mulgrew Miller was born in 1955. Gospel, blues and R&B were early influences as he grew up in the small town of Greenwood, Mississippi. At the age of eight he started taking classical piano lessons from a local teacher, but it wasn’t until fourteen, when he saw Oscar Peterson perform on a late night talk show, that he decided to pursue jazz. Miller went on to study music at Memphis State University, during which time he was hired as the pianist in the Duke Ellington Orchestra. He was then hired by legendary jazz vocalist Betty Carter, and moved to New York City, where he spent time in groups led by Woody Shaw and Tony Williams, and in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.

Still highly in demand as a sideman, Miller has also released a number of albums as a leader, the most recent being a couple of two-disc piano trio releases, Live at Yoshi’s and Live at the Kennedy Center. An active educator as well as performer, Miller balances his performing career with his teaching duties at William Patterson University, where he holds the position of Director of Jazz Studies.

I had the privilege of speaking with Mulgrew Miller in anticipation of his March duo concert with Kenny Barron as part of the Izzy Asper Jazz Performances series.

Tell me about playing in a piano duo context.

It’s a challenging situation because you rely on the other pianist so much. I have to say that of all the pianists I’ve played duo with over the years, playing with Kenny has been the most fulfilling.

How long have the two of you been performing together?

It started about 10 years ago at a club in New York called Bradley’s. It’s usually a piano and bass duo saloon, but for its twenty-fifth anniversary they booked a month’s worth of piano pairings. Kenny and I happened to be one of them.

You’ve played with so many amazing bandleaders throughout your career. Are there any associations that have been particularly influential or enjoyable?

They have all been enjoyable and influential so it’s hard to cite one above any others. Something I’ve learned is that there is no one way to do anything. They were all individuals who didn’t believe in sounding like anyone else.

I read that you never transcribe solos. What is your approach to learning music?

To learn music you need to learn how to listen. I never learned solos and wrote them down, but I do take things from the music I listen to and apply them to my own playing. If you really know how to listen you can teach yourself.

Can you practice listening?

Listening is a kind of awareness. You can get better at hearing certain things, but you don’t practice being aware—you just are. You need to be aware of when you’re aware, and when you’re not aware.

What are you listening to currently?

I listen to everything—I never focus on only one thing. Right now I’m listening to some Earl “Fatha” Hines, some Art Tatum, some Duke Ellington, some Herbie Hancock…

How do you approach composition?

My compositions often grow out of some area that I’m thinking about or working on, like a particular way of phrasing, a chord/scale relationship, or some other technique.

You work a lot with your trio. What do you look for when selecting musicians?

The first thing that I look for is a respect for the tradition of swinging jazz music, and a desire to play that music. We need to have an agreement about how the time is to be played. I look for a bass player with a strong pulse, careful note choice and attention to detail. The first questions I ask about a drummer are: Does he have a good beat? Does he understand the rolling of the ride cymbal? My current trio features Ivan Taylor on bass and Rodney Green on drums.

Why do you play music? What is your advice to students who want to play music as a profession?

I play music because music is my passion. If one’s honest, one plays what one is. I have a desire to tell a story and impart beauty to the listener. Besides the obvious things like discipline and commitment, students need to learn how to communicate with the listener. In the end, all musicians are singers. Musical expression in its essence is singing and dancing, and the more artfully one sings, the more deeply one can communicate.

Pianist Kenny Barron is a bona fide jazz master. Over his fifty-year career he has played with many of the best in the business, from apprenticing with legends such as Dizzy Gillespie and James Moody, to more recent collaborations with the likes of Charlie Haden and Regina Carter. His discography is a mile long, with over forty recordings as a leader. He’s been nominated for nine Grammy awards, and won countless readers’ and critics’ polls, including Downbeat, Jazz Times and Jazziz. He is a six-time recipient of Best Pianist by the Jazz Journalists Association, and just this year has been named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.

Winnipeggers will have the rare treat of hearing Kenny Barron in concert with fellow pianist Mulgrew Miller at the Berney Theatre at the beginning of March as part of the Izzy Asper Jazz Performances series.

I had a chance to talk to Kenny Barron over the phone about his long and varied career.

Who were some of your most important mentors?

I learned a lot from Dizzy—I spent 4 years with him, starting when I was 19. Also Yusef Lateef and James Moody. These were all people I worked with when I was very young, so I learned a lot from them, not just about music, but about life: how to handle yourself, how to conduct yourself, how to treat people…

I read that Yusef Lateef inspired you to go to university.

Yes, that’s very true. At one point, everyone in his band was in college. He was teaching at the time at Manhattan Music College. I had classes with him—I also had math, the whole thing.

You continued to tour through this time?

I was touring with him, as a matter of fact.

You taught at Rutgers University for quite some time.

I started in 1973, and I retired in 99. I’m teaching part-time at Juilliard now.

What is it that you enjoy about teaching?

Running into really fantastic students, and also perhaps having some kind of positive impact. I look at some of the students I taught: Terence Blanchard, Ralph Peterson, Regina Bell, Harry Allen—they all studied piano with me. I think I did have some positive impact. Some good students came through there!

What have you noticed about jazz students today?

Well probably the positive thing is that they’re all very well-equipped, in terms of knowing their instruments very well. They can sight-read almost anything. So the musicianship is really on a high level. The only thing they’re lacking is experience, and it’s very difficult for them to get that now. I think of the way I was able to get experience—playing in local clubs around Philadelphia, where I’m from. They’re not able to get that same kind of experience, so it takes them a little longer, that’s all.

Who are some of your favourite musicians to play with now?

I love the band I’m playing with right now. It’s a trio with Kiyoshi Kitagawa on bass and Johnathan Blake on drums.

What do you like about playing duo with Mulgrew?

For me, I learn a lot playing with Mulgrew—he’s very talented. We don’t play alike, but we have similar styles so there’s a high degree of compatibility when we play together. He listens, I listen. It really works.

I understand the two of you used to play duo at Bradley’s in New York?

That’s the first time we did it, at Bradley’s. We actually have two live albums recorded there—we did that just before they closed.

What was so special about Bradley’s?

Bradley’s was a special place—there’s never been a place like it since it closed. Probably the best thing I could say is it was definitely musician-friendly. Whenever I was working somewhere else in New York, I would always go by there after, because it was open later than all the other clubs. Even if I was working out of town, like Boston or something, I would make sure I got back just in time for the last set—or at least for the last drink! You would go in there on any given night, especially late, and the place would be full of musicians. It was a special place.

You’ve been recognized with many awards over your career, including the prestigious Jazz Master designation from the National Endowment for the Arts this year. How do you feel about these various honours?

They’re great. It’s a kind of acknowledgement of whatever contributions I may have made as a performer and teacher. It means I’ve had some great experiences, and hopefully I’ve given back. It also means I’m old!

The premise of Jazz Winnipeg’s Nu Sounds series is pretty straightforward: book strong local players and invite them to share what’s really firing them up these days. Now in its fourth season, Nu Sounds has offered Winnipeg audiences some amazing music—and a fuller notion about what jazz musicians here are doing with their time and talents.

The next concerts in the series feature two recent graduates of the U of M’s Jazz Studies program, both of whom have already made their mark on the local performing circuit.

Pianist Will Bonness is well-known to Winnipeg audiences as a player with tremendous fluency and inventiveness. For the last five years or so, he has been first-call pianist with high-profile players at the Winnipeg Jazz Festival, the Izzy Asper Jazz Performances series, the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra, and the U of M’s Summer Night Jazz Fest—a short list includes Oliver Lake, David “Fathead” Newman, James Carter, Stefon Harris, and Jon Faddis. A gig in Winnipeg with Avishai Cohen so appealed to the trumpet player that he booked him to play at New York’s famous jazz club, Small’s. Bonness joined Steve Kirby and Larry Roy on their CD Wicked Grin, confirming his talent as a composer as well as a performer. The band toured the festival circuit last spring, and made a big impact on audiences from the west coast to Montreal.

Last November, Bonness released his first CD, Subtle Fire, a trio recording featuring Steve Kirby on bass and Terreon Gully on drums. The bulk of these pieces are Bonness originals—beautiful works, with an almost sculptural sensibility to counterbalance the forward drive—and the others are inspired reconsiderations of familiar tunes like “Gingerbread Boy” and “It Never Entered My Mind.” Ross Porter, now the jazz mastermind behind Toronto’s Jazz.FM91 calls Subtle Fire “no ordinary debut. Will Bonness is a brilliant player, and bassist Steve Kirby and drummer Terreon Gully deepen and extend his expressive range on cut after cut. This is musical conversation at the highest level—smart, sensitive, profound, and absolutely exciting.”

Will Bonness will perform at the Park Theatre on Sunday, March 14, with Julian Bradford on bass and Curtis Nowosad on drums. Expect a wide-ranging program, with a strong connection to history but plenty of contemporary influences.

In the middle of April, singer Amber Epp will take over the same stage with one of her several ensembles, Amber Epp in Rhythm. When Epp left high school in Steinbach en route to the U of M, she was aiming for the classical piano program. Fortunately for audiences, her heart was swayed by jazz icons like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, and she opted for the jazz stream instead. Over the last three years, she has established herself as a singer with an infectious energy and a throaty big sound, and she’s carved out several niches. She sings a mean blues, many of them her own originals. She gives new life to instrumental standards, performing original lyrics and vocalese. And she has discovered her passion for Latin—so much so that she has been learning Spanish and Portuguese, mastering Latin percussion instruments, and performing regularly with Papa Mambo and her own Trio Bembe.

In November, Epp launched her first recording, Trio Bembe, alongside Will Bonness’ Subtle Fire—it was a party to remember, and was recorded by CBC. Soon afterward, she headed for several months of study in Cuba. Her Nu Sounds concert on April 18 will be a chance to welcome her back to Winnipeg. She performs that evening with her five-piece ensemble, Amber Epp in Rhythm—that concert will showcase the whole range of her interests as a jazz vocalist. In the afternoon, she shares the fruits of her winter musical adventures in Cuba in a TD Canada Trust Jazz Lab focused on Latin stylings.

Many of us in Winnipeg have watched these two young musicians hone their craft at the Cool Monday Night Hang and other stages around Winnipeg. They’re disciplined, playful, and passionate about this art form—just the sort of ambassadors we want representing the next generation of jazz artists here in the Jazz Capital of Canada.

Chances are you’ve heard the rich sound of Ken Gold’s baritone saxophone on a Winnipeg stage or club. Gold plays a lot of bari these days, though he’s comfortable on tenor, alto, and soprano as well. If you’re going to make a living as a working saxophonist, he points out, it helps to have facility on them all, and to be able to handle clarinet and flute as well. “If you have a strong conception of the sound, it’s not that hard,” he says.

Gold has a packed schedule. He is a regular member of the Ron Paley Big Band and the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra, and is a charter member of Papa Mambo, the local salsa sensation. He plays in Dave Lawton’s band, the Danny Kramer Events Band, and Brazilian Beats, Marco Castillo’s 8-piece ensemble. He also plays duos, trios, and quartets with many musicians, including a long-standing duo with guitarist Ron Halldorson—the two of them perform every Saturday afternoon at InFerno’s Bistro.

His gigs range widely in style and setting, and they have since he was first starting out. “I’m not a purist,” he says. That pragmatism has allowed him to flourish as a working musician, and explains not only the eclectic nature of his musical affiliations, but also his ability to fold gigging, teaching, and other musical work into a productive career.

Gold was born in 1958, the fifth child in a musical Montreal family. His mother was a good pianist, and had a baroque recorder ensemble. All of his siblings took piano lessons, but “it didn’t take” so his parents didn’t enroll him. Ken fooled around on the piano, but mostly soaked up music from his neighborhood. Many of his good friends came from musical households, and as young teens, they formed a band and played what they liked—rock, Santana, Weather Report.

Eventually Ken borrowed a saxophone, and in his mid-teens joined a military band where he learned to read music. Eventually he started to play with Haitian bands. They were amateur musicians, but had dance bands that played in clubs. “It was hilarious,” he recalls. “I was 17 and keen. I’d take 2 buses to get to a rehearsal and nobody would be there. They’d wander in 2 hours later—they were on Caribbean time!”

Montreal provided Ken a great musical milieu. There were lots of clubs, and the city was big enough to support really good local players, and draw in players from New York. Sayyd Abdul Al-Khabyyr , a reed player who played every chair in the Ellington band, was a devout Muslim who had a club on Park that served only tea and cakes. “He was a severe man,” Ken laughs, “I was scared of him!” The teens would trot in from afternoon street hockey and he’d be doing the Dolphy thing, really far-out stuff on the bass flute. “I remember sitting there listening to Nelson Symonds, a guitar player who’d jammed with Coltrane. So we had all this stuff coming at us when we were still young—it seeps into you…”

Gold studied music at Concordia in the early 80s, and flourished under great teachers like Charles Ellison and Andrew Homzy. “My personal idol,” he recalls, “was sax player, Dave Turner, the closest things to Cannonball in the flesh. It’s funny looking back, but I used to follow him everywhere—I’d just go hang out and hear music.”

By this point he was also playing—a lot. One of his treasured musical experiences was a gig with Big Mama Thornton, a huge force in blues history. “She had incredible stage presence,” he remembers. “I can see it: she sat on stage beside a little table with a drink on it, a fedora pulled low over her eyes. She had the band kick off a groove and she’d sit and wait till the groove was just right. Then she’d slowly get up and kick into ‘Little Red Rooster.’ It was magic!”

In 1984, he parachuted into a teaching job in Winnipeg, and apart from a 4-year stint in the 90s doing cruise ship work and a two-year Master’s program at Brandon, he has been a busy player on the music scene here ever since. He met Ron Paley early on, and through him a bunch of other influential Winnipeg musicians—Ron Halldorson, Reg Kellin, Dave Shaw, and others. He vividly remembers great concerts with Kerry Kluner’s big band, with featured artists like Diane Shuur, Bill Watrous, Jon Faddis, Tito Puente, and Paquito D’Rivera. “We did a Justin Time recording with Paquito—that was a big deal for me.”

He was around for the start of Papa Mambo, and counts Rodrigo Muñoz as one of his important musical peers here. Also on that list: Larry Roy, Gilles Fournier, Dave Lawton, Jeff Presslaff, and more recently Marco Castillo. Ron Paley and Ron Halldorson have been influential in his life, and Steve Kirby’s arrival 6 years ago has connected him with the U of M students and faculty.

What’s he listening to these days? “I’m fascinated by Afro-Cuban and Brazilian music,” he says. “There’s really mind-blowing stuff from the Balkans, funk and jazz and middle-Eastern sounds wrapped up together. And Indian music. And Afro-beat music. What turns my crank is the texture and emotional quality—it makes a gut level impression on me.”

I’ve spoken recently about the next level of Jazz on Wheels—we want to get the students from the band out into the neighborhoods to support those kids learning to make music themselves.

We’ve put a lot of energy into proving the feasibility of this project, and a lot of pieces are in place now. I think what needs to happen next is to just connect with community centers or schools who are interested in having us come in for a visit or two and share some basic music-making skills with interested kids. Now’s the time to make contact and develop some relationships—every day of not connecting with these kids is precious time wasted. As we get this Bridge Program established, we’ll make a clear case for financial support from either a granting agency or private funder. I have faith.

If this sounds like an experience you want for kids you work with, give us a call and we’ll see if we can arrange a visit!

This lesson was designed for a jazz band class comprised of grade 9 to 11 students.

In order to be successful at improvising, young musicians have to become absolutely familiar with song structures. One of the most effective ways to do that is by learning to construct and play bass lines over different chord progressions. The bass’s function is to outline the harmony and form of a piece, and because the bass is almost always playing, locking in can help situate you and keep your improvising musical. If you lose your sense of the form, listen for the bass line and that will put you back on track.

A basic twelve-bar blues form hinges on three basic chords, one built on the first note of the major scale (tonic), one built on the fourth note (subdominant), and one built on the fifth (dominant). An F blues would look like this:

It’s important to have those scale degrees in your ear, and not only in your eye. Sing the first four scale degrees to take you up to the subdominant—“Here Comes the Bride” gives you the 1-4 interval. Sing from the first scale degree up to the fifth to get the feel of the dominant—“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” is a quick memory trigger for 1-5. Practice finding those three pitches—1, 4, 5—then sing them through the blues form according to the diagram. Replace numbers with note names, and move it through a few keys, say C, F, and B♭. Practice until you can sing pitches by name effortlessly.

To construct a bass line over the blues, you use the mixolydian scale built on each of those three degrees. A mixolydian scale is only one note away from a major scale—the 7th degree of the scale is lowered one semitone, and that “flat seven” is one of the things that gives the blues its particular feel. For the F blues, you’ll build mixolydian scales on F, B♭, and C. Play through all three to get comfortable with the sound.

The mixolydian scale you use to build your bass line will depend on the chord in each bar over which you are constructing it. If a chord lasts for one bar, use the following pattern from the corresponding mixolydian scale: 1-2-3-5. If it lasts for two bars, use 1-2-3-5, 8-7-6-5. Here’s what that looks like:

Sing the pattern for each of the three chords, then sing the pattern through the blues progression. You’ve got a basic blues bass line!

One small adjustment will make your bass line smoother and more stylish. When you are descending toward measure 9, as you move to the fifth degree, slip in a semitone rather than playing the same note twice:

Commit your blues bass line to memory and practice until it feels completely familiar. At that point, the fun begins! Let various players in the band carry the bass line while others take turns improvising over it, then switch. Move through several keys, and learn new tunes or ‘heads’, that are built on the blues. You can also find a wealth of information by listening to the great soloists of jazz.

As you gain more familiarity with the blues form and more confidence in hearing how the bass outlines its structure, you will feel more comfortable when you solo, and your ideas will be more musical.

Sonny Rollins is arguably the greatest living improviser in jazz. His muscular, meaty tenor-sax playing and eloquent improvisations have made him an intimidating wonder of jazz.

Rollins is also one of the jazz world’s more interesting people. Three times he has taken a sabbatical from music. His initial break in 1954 was his most desperate, as he spent it at the federal drug treatment facility in Lexington, Kentucky, where he kicked his heroin addiction. Afterward, he spent several months in Chicago preparing to re-enter the jazz scene. Then in 1959, frustrated by what he thought were his musical limitations, he took his most famous break from public performing. To spare an expectant mother in his apartment building in New York’s Lower East Side the sound of his practicing, he took to playing late at night on the pedestrian walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge. When he returned to the jazz scene in 1961, he called his comeback album The Bridge. Rollins took his last sabbatical in 1968 to study yoga, meditation, and Eastern philosophies. By the time he returned to the music scene in 1971, he had become more interested in R&B and funk.

Sonny Rollins’s successes are as well-documented as his failures. In an article about Rollins in the June 2005 issue of JazzTimes, seventeen jazz musicians were polled for their favourite Sonny Rollins performances. Only one mentioned a recording after 1966. His most impressive body of work comes from the years 1956 to 1962 and includes Saxophone Colossus, Way Out West, Tenor Madness, A Night at the Village Vanguard, and The Bridge. All demonstrate energy, endurance, and inspiration.

The pivotal recording in bringing about the widespread acceptance of Rollins as a major figure is Saxophone Colossus [Prestige #PRCD-7079-2]. It inspired critics to write scholarly analyses and fans to revel in the hard-swinging invention, humour, and tender balladry of Rollins’s playing. It was recorded in just one day [June 22, 1956] in New York City, while Rollins was still a member of Clifford Brown’s group. The contributions of pianist Tommy Flanagan’s elegant swing, bassist Doug Watkin’s steady lift, and drummer Max Roach’s soloing helped make this a landmark album.

The album includes Rollins’s best-known composition, “St. Thomas,” a Caribbean calypso based on a song his mother sang to him as a child. His rendition of “Moritat” (an instrumental version of “Mack the Knife”) smoulders. “You Don’t Know What Love Is” is rich and melodic. Roach and Rollins trade licks on the blues-based “Blue 7” and play off of each other beautifully throughout. Rollins’s compelling and brilliantly played solo on this song helped define his style as an improviser.

Saxophone Colossus showcases the marriage of intellect, wit, soul, and guts that, from the record’s release onward, marked Rollins as a genius of improvised music.

I first felt invited into the African-American narrative through Tony Morrison’s Beloved, a novel that continues to be on my Desert Island list. The chance to feel the lives of her characters, and to see how they coped with a history of brutal disenfranchisement, deepened the impact of the musicians I admired who shared that history—Miles Davis, Nina Simone, John Coltrane, Betty Carter, Thelonious Monk…

Morrison’s work has been widely celebrated for its eloquence and power. Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, she observed: “Narrative has never been merely entertainment for me. It is, I believe, one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge.” That’s a big and potentially unsettling idea. If the stories we read (or watch or hear) shape what we know, we might want to be more alert to what we are taking in. We might also want to consider what we aren’t taking in, either because we’re not bothering, or because the stories are suppressed or drowned out.

Stories pull you into the feel of a situation, and that’s what Morrison is pointing to when she talks about “absorbing knowledge.” Writers like Morrison share harrowing experiences without completely devastating a reader—after all, you can set a book down if you choose. In the hands of a gifted teller, stories plant small explosions that crack open protective habits and opinions. They can literally change your mind.

In Canada, we tend to see the American history of slavery as painful but distant. Our writers say otherwise. Long-established black communities in Nova Scotia have been brilliantly portrayed by George Elliott Clarke in several novels, poetry collections, and even an opera, and more recently Lawrence Hill visited their earliest incarnations in his Commonwealth Prize-winning novel, The Book of Negroes. Christopher Paul Curtis’ wonderful Elijah of Buxton and Karolyn Smardz Frost’s I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land explore the black settlements in southern Ontario, final destinations of runaway slaves coming to Canada via the Underground Railroad.

The Canada in these narratives isn’t necessarily hospitable, and the tensions are prevalent in contemporary depictions as well. Writers like Dionne Brand and Austin Clarke, both Caribbean-Canadian, expose unexamined racial prejudice in our present-day city streets and public policy. Haitian-born Dany Laferrière shows the knife-edge between fascination and exploitation in racially-marked relationships. And these are just voices from the African diaspora. Add in the surge of First Nations writers, and the stories from burgeoning immigrant, rural, and gay communities—there are narratives enough to change our minds, if we will allow them.

Canada perpetuates an image of itself as a tolerant country, comfortable with its multicultural character. But stories in the news and in our coffee shops show that we are staggering under some cumbersome baggage. It’s time to imagine new ways forward—our artists have maps.