The last couple of months have been the busiest stretch for me in a couple of years. Since getting home from the Junos I have worked on a couple of new recordings, with veteran vocalists Melinda Whitaker, and David Clayton Thomas. Both of them were in peak form on the sessions, David in Toronto and Melinda in Nanaimo. I was handling arranging duties for both projects, as well as playing on them and also producing Melinda's sessions (capably assisted by Rick Salt). It was great to get out to Toronto to record with John Bailey and several of my old friends from the Toronto scene. Thanks to Scott Morin for hooking that up. Great to work with Vern, JJ, jLogue, the Marks, etc. I adjudicated at the West Coast Jazz Festival for a couple of days, always enjoyable, and popped over to Vancouver for Jon McCaslin's cd release with a great group including Brad Turner, Tilden Webb, and Jodi Proznick. Solid, well written, original jazz music. The recording is very good. Currently I am teaching the graduate program @ VIU (Nanaimo), preparing for my upcoming Songbook tour dates, and trying to stay on top of the week situation in the vegetable garden. It's getting warm, things are really starting to grow, and the salads from the garden have been fantastic!!

Had a lot of fun last weekend with the Ian McDougall 12tet. Ian is a really good friend and mentor of mine so I will always go out of my way to support his projects. He has a new "with strings" recording out that sounded great, from what I heard of it playing in the club. It was pretty packed on the Cellar stage with 12 of us but it's nice to have a tight setup. Lots of fab playing from everyone, Brad Turner always brings it, ditto for Cam Ryga, Ollie Gannon, of course Ian, and the rest. Now just working on polishing up the charts for Melinda Whitaker's upcoming recording and getting ready for a week trip out east, Juno stuff and some family fun.

I left home on Feb 8th, heading to Toronto. I spent the 9th getting settled in to my accommodations for the week, at the home of a good friend who was going to be away during that time. Feb 10th I got up, studied for about 4 hours then went to a rehearsal, soundcheck, and concert with Laila Biali. I have never made any secret of the fact that I am a huge fan of Laila's. Her overall level of musicianship is exceptionally high, and she uses all of that skill with taste, precision and a dazzling sense of style. Her band (George Koller and Larnell Lewis) is right there with her and added to the mix were some other special guests (including vocalist Marc Jordan). It was a very successful show and you can see some of the (video) recorded evidence on Youtube (great version of Stolen Land). A few days after that I was out at Humber College, performing with Hilario Duran, Roberto Occhipinti, and Mark Kelso. We were also joined on a few tunes by a great string quartet under the direction of Drew Jurecka. We did a few arrangements of mine, one based on the Trout Quintet and the other loosely derived from the Barber Cello Concerto. Everyone nailed it, no surprise, and it was a very enjoyable lunch time concert. After that I headed to the airport for the first of 3 shows with a quartet consisting of John Geggie, and Chet and Jim Doxas. Any time the Doxas' are onboard you have to stay on your toes, and John brings a great mix of "legit" chops and a loose and fun approach to playing on a varied repertoire. Great fun, and I hope we get to do it again.

Well, it was really gratifying to receive a Juno nomination for Changing Seasons. Believe it or not, I have been involved in 25 previous Juno nominated projects (at least) and 8 of those went on to win. But this is different because it's for a project that, from a musical standpoint, I was more or less in the drivers seat as far as the creative direction. There is no way I could have completed the project without the support of all the musicians, Peter Cardinali and Alma Records, a generous group of supporters who helped in large part to finance it, my family, and of course my co-conspirator Mark Fewer but, that said, this is one project that I really consider to be my baby and because of that the nomination is especially sweet. It will be great to go to Ottawa for the week of festivities and win/lose/or draw I continue to be honoured whenever I am recognized as being in the top tier of the Canadian music scene. Thanks to everyone who has gotten being the Seasons project.

My last two years of high school or so, starting about the time I got my drivers license, I started playing gigs with John, who had recently moved back to the island from Toronto. He was the subject of many outrageous stories (the bread truck story being the most noteworthy), had famously played with the Buddy Rich band, of course the Gzowski show, and others, but mainly to me he was a really important link to the 'pro' way of doing things. I ended up playing with John, sometimes 2 or 3 nights a week at various little spots in Nanaimo, Gabriola Island, Victoria, etc, lots of duo, and with drummers Mike Higgins and Garry Gaudet, and different local horn players. I learned a ton of tunes, often with John singing the melody to me the first couple of times through. After I came back from New York he was living in Vancouver, playing in the opera orchestra-I believe his stand partner was Chris Nelson-and we did some trio stuff with Blaine Wikjord, of which I still have a cassette from a gig at 'the Joint'. John was an exceptionally natural and well rounded musician, and a man with a keen intellect. His fascination with crows and ravens was well known, and he directed and composed for a short film for the NFB called Seven Crows a Secret, among other work he did for the NFB. His profile is here http://www.onf- nfb.gc.ca/eng/portraits/john_forrest/ Passionate, unpredictable, self-destructive, loyal, brilliant, and somehow out of step with many of the conventions of society, yet sharply aware of the foibles of same, a keen observer, and a rewarding but also frustrating guy to have as a friend. All that said I know that I’m a better person for having known John and I’m terribly sad thinking that I’ll never see him again. One further note. The nickname Blackie came from Tom Keenlyside, and was bestowed upon John as we (Tom, me, Whacker, and John) were playing cards-for money-in our hotel room, on a break from our stint as the house band for the Prince George telethon. (those 3 days generated a few stories). Anyway, as John was cleaning us out (he won most of we were making on the whole gig) he started adopting a piratesque countenance, complete with one menacingly drooped eyelid, and Tom said something to the effect of “check out ol’ Blackie there”, and it stuck like glue. As a caveat, that nickname might have an earlier pedigree, but I knew John pretty well and that was the first I heard of it. It sure got popular fast though. Anyway, Blackie was quite a guy, one of a kind. He will be missed.

This past Tuesday, Oct 25, was the official release date of the Changing Seasons album. I don't put out too many albums of my own, and this one was a big undertaking, so it's particularly gratifying to cross the finish line with this project. As I probably have noted earlier it wouldn't have been possible without the contributions of a generous group of supporters, a large group of very gifted musical co- conspirators, and Peter Cardinali (Alma Records). Mark Fewer also has to take a lot of the credit for helping to get the ball rolling on this and for his brilliant performance on the recording. Thanks Mark. Changing Seasons is available on iTunes and from major online distributors, as well as in your local record store, if you have one. Makes a great Christmas gift!!

Every once in a while you get a chance to stand on stage with one of your musical heroes, and so it was I found myself looking across the stage and seeing (and hearing) the great Jerry Bergonzi. Jerry's name was probably first mentioned to me by bassist Rick Kilburn, around my last year of high school. Steve Grossman had nothing but good things to say about Jerry (a rarity for Steve) and I spent some quality time listening to tapes of Jerry and George Garzone made at the Willow club. To my taste Jerry is the complete saxophonist, combining technique and theory with an outstanding rhythmic sense and underlying funkiness. I thought I might have a hard time resisting the urge to try and play like him, but in the end I tried to just take care of playing like me and ended up having more fun!! Big thanks to Remi Bolduc for the invite, and to his fab band (Dave Laing, Fraser Hollins, Steve Amireault) for the big pocket and great solos. I guess I didn't mention, this gig was at the Sala Rosa, in Montreal, last Oct 14. Great so see a packed house and I always look forward to my next visit to the great city of Montreal.

I am out on a short swing of dates with the west coast version of the Darren Sigesmund Sextet, 5 shows in all starting on Saltspring Island, and then on to Vancouver, Saskatoon, Whitehorse, and winding up in Edmonton. I have a lot of admiration for Darren in his dedication to writing and playing uncompromising and challenging music, and then having the wherewithal to get his groups out in the public eye both in Canada and across Europe and Asia. I've been around long enough to know what hard work and focus it takes to get your original music recorded and toured so my hat is off to Darren for all that he has accomplished in this area. I had been hearing about Darren's music for quite a while but we never really connected in Toronto when I was living there, in fact I think he was working as a high-end chef more in those days and returned to music more or less full time around when I pulled up stakes and headed back to the west coast. Anyway, the 'word on the street' on his stuff was 'really good, really hard' and it is good for sure, and as far as hard goes I think it is really more of a case of lack of familiarity with some of the rhythmic concepts he is working with that makes it hard at first. But, as is often the case, I've been finding that once you start finding the underlying logic of the material it really opens up in front of you. I have found the same thing playing music by Don Thompson and Kenny Wheeler, for example, where on first glance it all seems unfamiliar but as you play it, and analyze it, certain patterns and shapes start to reveal themselves. Of course sometimes it's just really hard, but it was fun working up the material for these dates and the band (Brad Turner, Ken Lister, Jesse Cahill, Eliana Cuevas, and Darren) is lots of fun to play with, and to spend time with when we are moving ourselves, and all our gear, from place to place. I am writing this at 35,000 feet on the way to Saskatoon on our way to gig #3. Coming up shortly on the heels of this tour are a show with Nikki Yanofsky + Vancouver Symphony Orchestra on Oct 5, and then a trip back east to visit some family and to Montreal for a concert with two favourite saxophonists of mine, Remi Bolduc and Jerry Bergonzi. That should be a treat!!

After we got back from Bamfield I had a minute to catch my breath. There were a few highlights over the rest of the summer that I'll share with you. First off a concert with Ingrid and Christine Jensen, my unofficial sisters. Always great spending time with them and even more fun was the fact that my son Ben was on board for the concert. Rounding out the month of July were two trio concerts, the first with piano phenom Misha Piatagorsky and bassist extraordinaire Neil Swainson. For this concert, at Sylvan United Church in Mill Bay, we passed around a clipboard with some paper for people to write tune requests and then we just made up our sets from those requests. This was a fun way to get the (capacity) crowd involved and I think it was a neat idea. The other trio concert was at the Kaslo Jazz Etc. festival, on the shores of Kootenay Lake. This was with my dear friend Alan Jones and, once again, Ben Dwyer on bass. This turned out to be a heck of lot of driving for a small amount of playing, but getting to hear Jim Byrnes play with the Nightcrawlers and Lindsay Mitchell was bonus and the people at the Kaslo festival do such a great job of making you feel comfortable that I am hoping I will be back soon. This year marked the first time in a while that we had not held the PDAMCA music/food camp. As I may have mentioned before it just felt like it would be too much to handle this year, and it turned out I was right, but I did squeeze in a one-week session with a small group of players from Vancouver, Calgary, and one local (Trevor the PDAMCA chef, also a fine tenor player). It was a blast working with the same group all week, I think we all left with the feeling that everyone had fun and learned a lot. I plan to hold more of these small group sessions next summer, and will start planning those around whatever tour plans materialize.

I am playing serious catch-up, my schedule has been full and I tend not to spend a lot of time in the office during the summer, if possible. This year, for the second time, I took part in Chris Donison's wonderful Music By The Sea festival. This 10 day event has been taking shape over the last several years and is an ambitious undertaking by Chris to bring together a large group (over 20) of musicians from different disciplines (primarily jazz and classical) to put on a series of concerts at the Rix Centre for Ocean Discoveries in Bamfield. Theresa and I stayed with Brad and Beth Anholt, who run the Centre, and we were treated like royalty. The whole community of Bamfield gets involved in the festival, opening their homes and providing a welcoming, family type, atmosphere for the incoming artists. With 10 concerts during the festival there were, of course many stunning performances. A personal favourite of mine was Joan Watson performing the Brahms Horn Trio, with Marc Ryser and Marc Destrubé. Another highlight for me was the debut performance of a brand new orchestration I did of a dance piece called Let Me Tell You About My Day. This had previously only existed in a midi version which I did around 10 years ago, so to hear the music performed by 18 great musicians was a real treat. I could go on, players like Al Kay, Chris Donnelly, Catherine Lee, Brian O'Kane, Jodi Proznick, etc, are always inspiring to hear and be on stage with. While I was there I landed a 25lb. spring salmon, the second time I got lucky on a Bamfield fishing trip. I certainly wish Chris all the best as Music By The Sea continues to grow and take shape.