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Volume 20 Issue 5 - February 2015

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Volume 20 Issue 5

Beat by Beat | Mostly

Beat by Beat | Mostly Jazz! Music To The Power Of All! ORI DAGAN “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” – Charlie Parker Jim Galloway’s way with a phrase – be it on the bandstand or on the page – was inspiring beyond words. This column is dedicated to the memory of a great artist and a true jazz ambassador whose loss is felt around the world. I’ll have more to say about him later in the column. First though, I want to speak of the power music has to unite us all, as manifested in a very special event that takes place on Wednesday February 11 at the Toronto Centre for the Arts. That evening, the We Are One Jazz Project will present its sixth annual gala concert, featuring legendary jazz pianist and educator Barry Harris, multi-instrumentalist and Order of Canada member Don Thompson, a big band, a string section, an adult jazz chorus, and at the heart of it all, a children’s choir comprised of 275 members from eight north Etobicoke schools. This incredibly ambitious undertaking is the result of many days and nights of hard work by countless individuals, most notably Howard Rees, the founder and president of We Are One Jazz Project, and 85-years-young bebop pianist and jazz education pioneer, Barry Harris. The seed of their fruitful collaboration dates back to 1978, when Rees moved to New York City to study with Harris for a period of six years. “Upon returning to Toronto, it became very important to me to both spread the wisdom that Barry shares so freely with his students and to do my part in documenting his methodologies – which to that point had been an oral tradition,” says Rees. “Over the past 30 years this has resulted in the creation of Howard Rees’ Jazz Workshops, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year; the Barry Harris Workshop Videos, three instructional book/dvd sets featuring Barry and dubbed the ‘bebop bible’ by Tommy Flanagan; an online school featuring over 200 video lessons on Barry’s methodology; harmony articles for Keyboard Magazine; clinics at colleges in 10 or 12 countries, and the We Are One Jazz Voices, a choir that performs Barry’s original compositions and his arrangements of standards.” In addition to bringing jazz to a wider audience and education to the general public about the jazz tradition, around 2008 Rees and Harris pondered the possibility of using jazz as a force for social change. The result was the founding of the We Are One Jazz Project as a Canadian charitable organization. “Our purpose is to harness the beauty and power of jazz to inspire and empower young students who don’t have access to high-level music programs at their schools. We accomplish this goal through an intensive four-month program that brings together the students with master musicians in an enriched learning and performance environment. We work with several hundred students in grades 3 to 6 each year. Since 2008 we have brought the Project to 2,000 students in more than 50 schools in six priority neighbourhoods of Toronto. There are many wonderful stories, such as the student who stopped stuttering after being in the program. Another where a student sang a solo at a 300-member choir rehearsal after being mute (unbeknownst to us at the time) since the beginning of the school term. When we began in 2008, the city had identified 13 areas as ‘priority’ neighborhoods. As of this year that number has been revised to 31. So, as for future plans, we look forward to bringing this award-winning and life-changing program to many more students for years to come.” The music performed at the concert is written and arranged by Barry Harris, and the program’s success relies greatly upon its teachers, including vocal coach Rita di Ghent who has the following to say: “Being the jazz vocal coach for the WAOJP is endlessly fascinating and rewarding. I’ve always taught university students so for me, teaching jazz to youngsters has added this whole lovely dimension to my teaching career. Barry Harris’ tunes are stunningly beautiful and complex, but our grades 3 to 6 can sing anything you throw at them – not because they’re musically trained, but because they’re little sponges. They don’t know that jazz music is hard! The process of watching the singers unfold over the course of five months really is magical. We get to see children of all backgrounds and psychologies become hooked by the music and the spirit of working together. It changes their lives. And so it changes mine.“ A new addition to the staff this year is children’s choral conductor Sophia Perlman, responsible for rehearsing the choir and making sure that We Are One sings as one. “Because I grew up with so much choral background in my own early musical life it has been really nice to see it reinforced,” says Perlman. “For me personally it’s interesting to see the way that choral training can reinforce jazz – I don’t think it’s a connection that necessarily gets made all of the time. For example, as an improviser, if you have to follow harmony, you’re going to have an easier time if you’ve had to be responsible for singing the inner parts of a harmony in a choir such as this one.” Perlman also emphasizes the profundity of having Barry Harris work directly with the children. “Kids in schools are not taught to necessarily connect composers with living people – generally if you ask kids who are some composers, they will name mostly dead composers. And so for these kids to learn these songs for weeks and weeks and then to sit there and learn the songs from the person who wrote them, and the fact that he will be playing the songs with them on the eleventh, it connects them to the music and the fact that music is made by people, and I think that’s really important.” Continues on page 47 18 | February 1 - March 7, 2015 thewholenote.com

KEN HOWARD Beat by Beat | On Opera Listening Up CHRISTOPHER HOILE On January 14 Canadian Opera Company General Director Alexander Neef unveiled the COC’s 2015/16 season including the first mainstage world premiere of a Canadian opera since 1999 and plans for other productions of Canadian operas in the future. Unlike the present season, the COC’s 65th season includes two evenings of works the company has never before presented and is a mixture of opera rarities and masterpieces. The 2015/16 season will open with a new production of Verdi’s La Traviata, replacing the generally disliked production by Dmitri Bertman that played in 1999 and 2007. The new COC production is a coproduction with Lyric Opera of Chicago and Houston Grand Opera directed by Arin Arbus and was well received at its Chicago premiere in 2013. Russian Ekaterina Siurina and Canadian Joyce El-Khoury alternate in the role of Violetta. American Charles Castronovo and Canadian tenor Andrew Haji alternate as Violetta’s lover Alfredo. And American Quinn Kelsey and Canadian James Westman alternate as Alfredo’s father Germont. Italian conductor Marco Guidarini leads the COC Orchestra and Chorus for 11 performances from October 8 to November 6, 2015. In repertory with Traviata is the world premiere of Pyramus and Thisbe, written in 2010 by Canadian Barbara Monk Feldman. For those who may wonder, Monk Feldman is the widow of renowned American composer Morton Feldman (1926-87), was formerly his student and married him shortly before his death. The story, as students of Shakespeare will know, is the subject of the play the Mechanicals present to the court at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595). Though the subject is serious, Shakespeare’s amateur troupe performs it so badly it is the comic highpoint of the play. As a tragedy of misunderstandings, Pyramus and Thisbe also served as the model for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet written in the same year as Dream. To complement Monk Feldman’s one-act opera are two works by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) from the very beginnings of opera. The Lamento d’Arianna (1608) is the only fragment of music that survives from Monteverdi’s second opera Arianna about Ariadne’s abandonment by Theseus on the island of Naxos, later the subject of Richard Strauss’s Adriadne auf Naxos (1916). The second work is Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624), which is not really an opera at all but a section of Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata (1581) set to music. Toronto last saw it in a production by Toronto Masque Theatre in 2008. The major role is that of the Narrator who describes the encounter during the Crusades of the Christian knight Tancredi with his beloved Clorinda, who, unbeknownst to him, has disguised herself as an enemy Saracen knight. Krisztina Szabó, who sings Erwartung later this season, will sing Monteverdi’s Arianna and Clorinda and Monk Feldman’s Thisbe. Phillip Addis returns as Pyramus and Owen McCausland is Testo in Il combattimento. Some COC regulars will be unhappy to learn that Christopher Alden, who gave us such unlovely productions as the Nazi Fledermaus in 2012 and the ruthless Clemenza di Tito in 2013, has been hired to direct. Johannes Debus, however, will conduct the seven performances from October 20 to November 7. Luca Pisaroni in the Santa Fe 2012 production of Maometto II. The winter season pairs Wagner’s Siegfried (in François Girard’s now familiar production) with Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in a production formerly owned by the Salzburg Festival. American soprano Christine Goerke, who will be making her role debut as Brünnhilde in Die Walküre this season, will return in that role in Siegfried. German tenor Stefan Vinke sings the title character. Austrian Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke sings the wily dwarf Mime, who raises Siegfried, and Alan Held sings the head Nordic god Wotan, here known only as The Wanderer. Johannes Debus conducts the seven performances from January 23 to February 14. The Marriage of Figaro is directed by acclaimed German director Claus Guth in a production popular at the Salzburg Festival since it first premiered in 2006. The cast includes Austrian bass-baritone Josef Wagner as Figaro, Canadian Jane Archibald as Susanna, Canadian Erin Wall as the Countess, Russell Braun, who sings the title role in Don Giovanni this season, as the Count and American Emily Fons as Cherubino. Johannes Debus leads the opera through 11 performances from February 4 to 27. For its spring season of 2016, the COC revives its Carmen seen last only in 2010, this time directed by Toronto’s own Joel Ivany, artistic director of Against the Grain Theatre which recently presented its own inventive version of Don Giovanni as #UncleJohn last year. Georgian mezzo Anita Rachvelishvili and French mezzo Clémentine Margaine alternate in the title role. American tenor Russell Thomas and Canadian David Pomeroy alternate as Don José. Canadian sopranos La belle Hélène by Jacques Offenbach Uri Mayer, conductor Joel Ivany, director THE GLENN GOULD SCHOOL OPERA WED., MAR. 18, 2015 7:30PM FRI., MAR. 20, 2015 7:30PM KOERNER HALL Offenbach’s witty political and cultural satire finds the perfect heroine to poke fun at in this parody of the story of Helen of Troy’s elopement with Paris. Generously supported by Earlaine Collins TICKETS START AT ! 416.408.0208 www.performance.rcmusic.ca 273 BLOOR STREET WEST (BLOOR ST. & AVENUE RD.) TORONTO thewholenote.com February 1 - March 7, 2015 | 19

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