Guelph Jazz Festival Continues to Inspire, Engage, and Incite Dialogue


Lee Pui Ming and Dong-Won Kim in intense conversation at the Guelph Youth Music Centre. ©Brett Delmage, 2014

​Reviews for the 2014 Guelph Jazz Festival are coming in, and as usual, the Festival is celebrated for its daring and unique sounds, community engagement, and inclusivity.  
 
Ottawa Jazz Scene, “Guelph Jazz Festival helps kids find their voices through technology.”
 
The Ontarion, “An Afternoon at the Guelph Jazz Festival.”
 
Arts Journal, “Guelph Jazz Fest Colloquium of Cosmic Improvisation.”

"People Get Readt"/ The Future of Jazz: Amiri Baraka and William Parker in Conversation. 

William Parker—one of the most inventive and expressive avant-garde jazz musicians today—is an American free jazz double bassist, poet, composer, and an urban Zen monk. In 2007, William Parker’s book, who owns music?, was published by buddy’s knife jazz edition in Cologne, Germany. who owns music? assembles his political thoughts, poems, and musicological essays. In who owns music?, Parker describes music as a “sound painting,” opening up music as an organic material that cannot be owned: “No one owns music, no one invented music, it existed before the human species was created and may have played a part in the creation of man and womankind. Music lives in a world separate from the musician, a world of which we have only touched the surface” (34). In 2011, Parker’s second book,Conversations, was published by Rogue Art. Parker has been a mainstay at the Guelph Jazz Festival, having performed numerous times.

Amiri Baraka is a poet and playwright of incendiary rage and collective insight, who went from Beat poet to Black Nationalist and finally Marxist-Leninist. He left the planet on January 9, 2014. Among his most known works are the poetry collections The Dead Lecturer and Transbluesency: The Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961-1965), his plays Dutchmen and A Black Mass, and his various works on Black music, such as Blues People and Black Music. Along with Ezra Pound, Amiri Baraka remains one of the most controversial and least understood American poets. As M.L. Rosenthal wrote, “No American poet since Pound has come closer to making poetry and politics reciprocal forms of action” (qtd. in Baraka Reader xxi). For Baraka, art was a weapon of revolution. Further, Baraka wrote some of the most insightful works on African American music, appropriately referring to the music as American classical music. His poetry was always musical, for as he states in Blues People, the poem must “swing—from verb to noun.” The “changing same” was his designation of the interplay between tradition and the individual talent in Afro-American music.

In 2007, William Parker released The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield with poet Amiri Baraka, a project that examines what was happening to the people through Mayfield’s enduring and empowering music and legacy. A discussion between Parker and Baraka—moderated by jazz and creative music radio personality Ron Gaskin—around this work, the nature of art and social change, and the very future of jazz took place during the 2007 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium. For this month’s Oral History we travel back to that lively 2007 panel discussion.

• Watch the entire interview, here.
• The full transcript is available, here. (Check out the new format).

Quote of the Month:

“I say, play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing, even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.”  
-Thelonious Monk

Thelonious Sphere Monk was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1917, and by 1940 he was working with the major jazz figures of his time. Monk is said to have started playing his style of jazz in the early forties, when he played piano at Minton’s in Harlem. In ’47 he recorded sessions for Blue Note records that placed him at the epicenter of modern jazz. In 1964, Monk became the third jazz musician to have his portrait on the cover of Time magazine, after Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck. Monk remains, for poets, writers, and musicians alike, a symbol of creative freedom. 

Image of Monk in the public domain, from here.

About ICASP

 

The international Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice research project explores musical improvisation as a model for social change. The project plays a leading role in defining a new field of interdisciplinary research to shape political, cultural, and ethical dialogue and action.

As a form of musical practice, improvisation embodies real-time creative decision-making, risk-taking, and collaboration. Improvisation must be considered not simply as a musical form, but as a complex social phenomenon that mediates transcultural inter-artistic exchanges that produce new conceptions of identity, community, history, and the body. This project focuses primarily on jazz and creative improvised music. The dominant theoretical issues emerging from this music have vital social implications.

Check out our diverse research collection.