Volume 8 Issue 1 - September 2002

Udo Kasemets, continued

Udo Kasemets, continued music is something undefinable. The response is always very personal and individual, as is the decision of what is and isn't music. STEENHUISEN: Do you find the word music to be confining? KASEMETS: Unfortunately it has become a compartment. For peciple today, music is reeordings, it's something to have and own - that's what they listen to and that is music. Art milsic isn't even mentioned in today's context, whereas one hundred years ago, that was the music. The definition of music shifts in the culture, yet ultimately there is no fixed definition for it. In this world, where there is so much information coming in, we have tO make our own decisions, and become more concentrated on what is really what ... on questioning. At the beginning of the 2()

Above: Ajay Heble Below: Marilyn Crispell garde music club that runs an impressive jazz festival each June. Three days of seminars and muskal workshops are part and parcel of the Guelph experience. This alone would be worth the trip to .Guelph. The symposium joins musicologists, cultural studies scholars and musicians. Heble is an important thinker in the field, via his oook .for Routledge, Landing ori the Wrong Note: Ji:zv., ·Dissonance, and Critical Practice. An anthology of presentations at successive symposia, The . Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz., .Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, will be published by Wesleyan University Press. AU this flurry of creative activity is rendered even more impressive because it is the product of community volunteering. Heble's labour of love is made possible by takirig part-time, unpaid leave from his job as professor of literature at Guelph and other faculty members also contribute time. Most of the festival's · board and staff of volunteers come from outside the campus. The ma" jority could not have imagined themselves listening to this kind of music 'ten years ago, much Jess volunteerr ing time and energy to support it. · The Guelph Festival is witness that the ears of the wider community can be opened, with appropriately wise approaches, to the weird and wonderful. · Getting down to specifics: the "extended c\owntown musicians" include household names (for folks with my kind of ears) such as: Fred Anderson, Marilyn Crispell, Hamid Drake, Fred Frisk, Hasidic New Wave, Kidd Jorctan, George Lewis, Rob Mazurek, Jason Moran, Larry Ochs, William Parker, Dewey Redman and CuongVu. Wow!! Among the "mix and match" . events, there's Lotte Anker (Denmark) ·and Crispell; TO's Jane Bunnett with Redman; Montreal's JAZZ NOTES by Jim Galloway Fran