Jazz Articles about Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra

Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra: Tidal Currents: East Meets West

by Jack Bowers
February 26, 2024

When it comes to appraising contemporary big bands, Canada's Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra is on equal footing with the best of them. For its seventh album, Tidal Currents, the WJO has engaged two of that country's leading jazz composers, Jill Townsend and Christine Jensen, to present in musical terms impressions of places that have a special meaning to them, in particular the bodies of water that inspired them in their younger years and up to this point in time.

Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra: Voices: A Musical Heritage

by Jack Bowers
February 8, 2023

No matter where in the world one looks, there is musical history worth exploring and celebrating--which is what the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra sets out to affirm on its sixth album, Voices: A Musical Heritage. Winnipeg is the capital of Canada's Manitoba Province, and Voices pays tribute to the area's rich and expansive musical fabric via a series of eight compositions designed to exemplify some of Manitoba's far-flung heritage: First Nations, Metis, Ukrainian, Jewish, Chilean, Brazilian, Nigerian and Icelandic.

Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra: Suite 150 / A Big Band Portrait

by Jack Bowers
August 16, 2018

To commemorate Canada's one hundred-fiftieth anniversary in 2017, the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra commissioned eleven of the country's foremost jazz composers to write music “reflecting some aspect of Canada or being Canadian." The resulting Suite 150 was performed for appreciative audiences and recorded for posterity in November 2017 and March 2018 at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Besides writing, five of the composers double as soloists on their own themes: trumpeters Richard Gillis ("From Far & Wide") and Christine ...

The Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra: WJO

by Jack Bowers
March 12, 2005

On its self-titled debut album, the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra offers the listener the best of two possible worlds--a thinking person's big band that also swings. There's a lot happening in these ten original compositions (including the two-part French-Canadian/Métis Suite), but the elaborate charts seldom interrupt the band's essential purpose, to present high-caliber music that is not only aesthetically pleasing but viscerally captivating as well.

Pianist Michelle Grégoire wrote the evocative Suite, as she did the almost-blues “Minor Alterations," while trombonist ...