Josh Grossman's blog

With the demise of the Canada Council's Grants for Specialized Music Sound Recording, artists in the jazz and contemporary classical music genres (among others) are looking for new sources of funding in support of recording projects. With that in mind, I attended a session presented by FACTOR (the Foundation Assisting Canadian Talent on Recordings), to see if FACTOR might be a good alternative to the Canada Council's program.

Ever since my first year as a student in the University of Toronto's Jazz Performance Program I've understood that New York City is a hotbed of jazz activity. I've not spent a lot of time there, though, so last weekend I made the first of what I hope to be semi-regular jaunts south of the border. I think it will be helpful to keep track of certain emerging trends, meet new musicians, venue owners and presenters, and help to keep Toronto on everyone's jazz radar.

Three months (since I started, anyway), hundreds of emails and dozens of phone calls later, we're ready for our close-up. This Tuesday, April 13, we'll be live-to-air on JAZZ.FM91 to announce the highlights from the 2010 TD Toronto Jazz Festival lineup. Things get underway around 2 pm; make sure you tune in!

I was going to wax philosophical in today’s blog posting...take on some subject or another such as whether and how musicians need to communicate with their audience...or the effect of the digitization of music and the written word on jazz recordings and magazines...or whether Facebook is a good tool for, well, anything...

On Wednesday night I attended the University of Toronto jazz program’s tribute to Paul Read, who, after 17 years as director of the program, is stepping down at the end of this year. Simply called "Thank you, Paul!" , it was a great night—the 10 and 11 O’Clock Jazz Orchestras performed Paul’s arrangements and compositions, and the graduate ensemble added one tune (also a Paul Read original) to the mix.

The 2010 JUNO Awards nominations were announced recently and we’re pleased to see a number of names familiar to the local jazz scene on the list! Toronto Downtown Jazz offers congratulations to all of the nominees and especially the Toronto-based jazz musicians:

I was chatting last week with trumpeter Jeremy Pelt at The Rex Hotel about how he lined up his two-night stint. His answer was simple: “I called Tom.” I’ve had similar conversations with a number of musicians.

I was taking in the Mike Webster Nonet at The Rex Hotel last week and at a certain point during his set Mike introduced a tune as follows: “I’ve been exploring a lot of different time signatures and harmonies and I thought it was time to write a simple tune.” And the tune they subsequently played was just that: simple. And beautiful. And it got me thinking—what makes music beautiful?

It’s now been one month since I took on the role of Artistic Director of Toronto Downtown Jazz and these past four weeks have been action-packed: exciting, overwhelming, challenging, illuminating...I’ve learned a lot about how the festival runs - which artists sell tickets, which venues work best - and look forward to learning even more over the next six months.