Thinking Spaces: Thursday November 21, 2013


The next meeting of the Thinking Spaces Reading Group and Speakers Series will occur Thursday November 21, from 8-10 pm in the Mackinnon building on the University of Guelph campus in room 103. We will continue our theme of “Improvisation and Community Music Making” by exploring the topic “Improvisational Methods and Choral Communities.” We will be joined by Christine Duncan (vocal improviser and conductor of the Element Choir), Dr. Gerard Yun (improviser, choral conductor at Conrad Grebel University College and Wilfred Laurier University, and Artistic Director of the East-West concert series), and Gary Diggins (improviser, and co-director of the Sotto Voce vocal workshops). For a portion of the session, via Skype, we will be joined by Kathy Kennedy (improvising vocalist, director of Choeur Maha and global HMMM events).

For more on: Christine Duncan, see here.

Dr. Gerard Yun, see here.

Gary Diggins, see here.

Kathy Kennedy, see here.

Anyone who would like to prepare for the discussion can peruse the websites above and/or explore the discussion thread here.

The group is free and open to all.

ORAL HISTORIES PROJECT

Oral Histories is a showcase of interviews, performances, and articles by and about improvising musicians, artists, writers and scholars. This monthly feature offers an intimate look inside the minds and practices of some of the many dynamic, innovative people whose energy and ideas make improvisation studies such a vibrant field of inquiry. The Oral Histories project provides a space for improvising artists to be heard in their own words, often in dialogue with other improvisers, scholars, and practitioners.

THOMAS KING
 

“There’s Something About the Look”: Thomas King in Conversation with Dionne Brand

Thomas King is one of Canada’s most prolific writers: a renowned novelist, a broadcaster (The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour), a screenwriter, a onetime NDP electoral candidate for Guelph in 2008, an astonishing photographer, and the first person of aboriginal descent to be chosen to give the Massey Lectures (in 2003). His latest book, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (2012), shares his extended reflection on Native identity through history, humour, and King’s incredible personal meditations. As King says (and which is quoted in nearly every essay about his work), “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (The Truth about Stories 2). Given his ability to balance so many creative forms of expression, it is fair to call King a consummate improviser par excellence. He is indeed a master storyteller with a unique ability to connect various relations together to create a complex weaving that animates his active desire to find moral harmony in an often-inharmonious world. As King explains, the First Nations term “all my relations” is “an encouragement for us to accept the responsibilities we have within this universal family by living in a harmonious and moral manner” (All my Relations ix)—a reminder of the responsibility we have to our families, the natural world, and (by extent) our fellow human beings. This view of the world is one that brings about change through actions, and works towards building a better future; there are two choices: “a world marked by competition or a world determined by co-operation” (Stories 25). And while King is best known as a storyteller and novelist, he is not as well known, although perhaps he should be, for his ability to tell narratives through photography.

Before King became a writer and an academic, he was telling stories through photography, working in the 1960s in a commercial studio in Auckland, New Zealand, and then for Australian Consolidated Press, further developing his skills after arriving in Canada in 1980, eventually capturing much of the history of the Guelph Jazz Festival through his photos (Martinez 27-30). King’s photographic chronicling of the history of jazz and improvised music in Guelph tells a story about the nature of the music, as well as the power of inspiring collaborations. King provides an acute behind-the-scenes perspective of the Guelph Jazz Festival: his photography ties together the various “relations” of the festival, and his candid portraits of artists are stories unto themselves. In this month’s Oral History, Dionne Brand (ICASP Advisory Board Member and a master-storyteller in her own right) sits down with the Governor General Award-winning author Thomas King to discuss King’s photo exhibition, “Sound Check: The Jazz Photography of Thomas King.” Brand and King discuss King’s early career as a photographer before he achieved fame as a writer, his approach to photography, the techniques he employs, and the background to some of the photos highlighted in the exhibition. In Fall, 2013, the exhibit at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre included selections from his 20 years of photographing the Guelph Jazz Festival. King's photos were also displayed at the Boarding House for the Arts during the Guelph Jazz Festival & Colloquium, 2013. The exhibition catalogue was also published in Fall 2013. It contains a jointly written foreword by Ajay Heble and Dawn Owen, an interview with Thomas King by Dionne Brand (featured here), an essay by Mauricio Martinez, and a biographical profile by Christine Bold. Get your copy today at MSAC and enjoy the interview.

Works Cited

Heble, Ajay, and Owen, Dawn. Sound Check: The Jazz Photography of Thomas King. Guelph: MSAC, Guelph Jazz Festival, and ICASP. 2013. Print.

King, Thomas (Ed). All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction. Toronto: McClellan & Stewart Ltd, 1990. Print.

--- The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: Dead Dog Café Productions INC and CBC, 2003. Print.

Quote of the Month:

“I’ve been interested in showing that I’m aware that there’s a big world out there, and that all of us are influenced by many different parts of that world. I’m going to tie this back into jazz and improvisation, and so on, by saying that I think that maybe one of the strongest appeals of jazz as an art form—for many of us—is that it is automatically at its roots: cosmopolitan, multicultural, polyphonic, and all of those notions of diversity and diverse engagements are important to me. I like the idea of a collage; I like the idea of the cubist juxtapositions of different things, and so on. I like being able to look out at the larger world and find aspects of it in terms of other arts, other artists, writers, as well as other persons and their particular philosophies or ways of doing things, or ways of speech especially.”
-George Elliott Clarke in conversation with Paul Watkins and Katherine McLeod


George Elliott Clarke is a Canadian poet and playwright. His work largely explores and chronicles the experience and history of the Black Canadian community of Nova Scotia, creating a cultural geography that Clarke refers to as “Africadia.” In 2003 Clarke wrote the jazz libretto Québécité at the request of the Guelph Jazz Festival, with music composed by Juno award-winning pianist D.D. Jackson. His most recent book of poetry is Red.
 
On April 27th, 2012, accompanied by bassist David Lee, Clarke delivered a reading and interview entitled, “Your bass sounds like a typewriter” at the TransCanada Institute at the University of Guelph. The event was presented in partnership with Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice. You can watch the event and read the transcript as a featured Oral History.