Classic Summer Blogger Sara Krahn sits down with Winnipeg’s Jazzman Steve Kirby to talk about his latest project!

You won’t get too far into a conversation with Steve Kirby before you realize that the guy literally exhales jazz. Since moving to Winnipeg from New York City in 2003, Kirby has been a major player in shaking up and enlivening this city’s jazz scene. During his first year in Winnipeg, Kirby created the Jazz Studies Program at the University of Manitoba - the first program in Canada to focus exclusively on Jazz Studies (!) - and every year the faculty, students and alumni are heavily involved in Winnipeg’s TD International Jazz Festival.

This year, Kirby is doing his jazz thing and breaking ground at the Festival with the debut of his latest musical experiment, The Longitude Project, featuring the Oceanic Jazz Orchestra, traversing an innovative musical tour of vastly diverse sounds from Argentina to Nunavut.


I had the fantastic opportunity to sit down with Kirby in his office at Tache Hall, where he enlightened me about his idea of what it means to be an artist, and how it has influenced his vision for The Longitude Project.


“Now that I look back, I must have been working on this thing for most of my musical life,” says Kirby, regarding The Longitude Project.


He’s an introspective guy, but you combine this with his mega-charismatic presence and suddenly everything he says seems to carry some kind of epic weight. Listening to him talk, I’m trying to wade my brain through the treasure-trove that is literally everything he is saying.


“And the project is nowhere near completion,” Kirby continues. “Like a book of poems, when is it ever complete? There’s always a new poem, new time, new zeitgeist. Because there are a million different versions of the truth - or excuse me, 6 billion versions of the truth. There is our own, individual truth, and then there is everyone else’s.”


“As an artist, I want to find those commonalities between our truths. I want to find a cryptic, archetypal language that takes the experience you’re having, and interprets it to someone else as intact as possible.”


Kirby understands his music first and foremost as communication - he is always looking for those moments of synergy between the music, the performers and the audience.


“You know you are getting there when you hear a certain crush in the instrument and it shimmers, and you see the people react in the same way that you did, where they’re depleted and in shock and in nirvana all at the same time.”


So what is The Longitude Project, and how does it fit into Kirby’s artistic philosophy, breaching cross-cultural divides through the artistic experience?


“With The Longitude Project, I’m taking the music, poetry, and folklore of lesser known places between Argentina and Nunavut, and applying to these models the technique of jazz communication.”

For those of us who are not brushed up on our jazz history, this is innovative because almost all jazz musicians today use European or American tunes to develop their art. Instead of using conventional European songs, however, Kirby is taking folk models from more obscure parts of the globe to develop a broader jazz language - everything from the Argentinian Tango and MIlanga to electronica and gut-wrenching soul ballads to Northern Indigenous throat singing.


“There’s no way to put the project in a nutshell! But I think that the final thing I’m going for is a kind of Earth Sound, a sound that resonates in one way or another no matter who or where you are. The idea is that each one of our stories is unique and beautiful, and at the same time, there is a common thread between them all. And so we find out that all of us have alot at stake in preserving not only what it is about you and your race and culture, but also identifying what’s common between multiple races and cultures. As you can see, I’m old as the hills, but I dream like a little kid!”


And as a vehicle for his musical dreams, Kirby created a big leagues ensemble which he coined as the Oceanic Jazz Orchestra (the name ‘Oceanic Orchestra’ is meant to euphemize the term Third World, but Kirby doesn’t like the term ‘Third World’ because of the cultural hierarchy that it implies).


The OJO is made up of premier jazz and classical musicians from New York, San Francisco, Toronto and Winnipeg. This year, the orchestra features special guest artists the likes of veteran bassoonist Paul Hanson from San Fran, steele guitar prodigy Mike Eckhardt from Toronto, and up-and-coming vibes player Joel Ross from New York.


The Longitude Project will take the city by storm this Friday, June 24th at The West End Cultural Centre. Show starts at 8PM. Tickets are $28/advance.