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Colloquium brochure and schedule for the 2007 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium “People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is NOW!” held September 5–7 2007.

Biographies and abstracts for all speakers and presenters at the 2008 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium on Diaspora, Dispersal, Improvisation, and Imagination held September 3–5 2008.

Colloquium brochure for the 2008 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium on “Diaspora, Dispersal, Improvisation, and Imagination” held September 3–5, 2008.

Dr. Deborah Wong discusses improvised solos in Japanese American drumming and their relationship to ideas about tradition and hybrid cultural identities. Gender is also a focal point of the talk, and numerous video examples of taiko performances are presented.

While examining the presence of improvisatory practices in opera over the course of history, the Hutcheons discuss the ongoing hybridization of opera with other art forms, and how racial identities have been represented in opera.

A profile of a collaborative outreach project conducted throughout the summer of 2008 for youth with disabilities involving ICASP, KidsAbility, and the Guelph Jazz Festival.

Anthony Braxton gave the keynote address at the 2007 Guelph Jazz Festival and kindly let us video record it. Here we offer an edited transcription. Professor Braxton has also provided three supplementary charts, included as appendices, that help to explain his terminology and his system.

Wayde Compton is a Black Canadian writer/poet, DJ, and historian, born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. Compton has published two books of poetry: 49th Parallel Psalm, and Performance Bond. He has also edited an anthology, Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature, and recently a collection of essays entitled, After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region.

George Elliott Clarke is one of Canada’s most prolific poets. He is also a renowned essayist, scholar, playwright, and, in many ways, a songwriter. 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.” Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia in 1960, near the Black Loyalist community of Three Mile Plains, as a seventh-generation Canadian of African American and Mi’Kmaq Amerindian heritage.

d’bi.young anitafrika is a Jamaican-Canadian dub poet, monodramatist, educator, and Dora Award-winning actor and playwright. In this month’s Oral History we are gifted with an on stage interview with d’bi.young, and we get to witness the power of dub poetry in action by one of Canada’s most renowned dub poets.