about us
salt spring jazz and blues society
Revived in 2006 to become the sponsoring organization for the Salt Spring Jazz Festival. Benefiting from the vision and energy of our founding Artistic Director, Monik Nordine, we have produced three successful annual, weekend-long festivals in late June. In addition, we present a few concerts each year outside the festival. We have hosted local and West Coast jazz and blues musicians as well as artists from farther away. Some have, in addition to performing, presented workshops for local amateur and school student musicians.
Our Mission: to produce jazz concerts and workshops, meaning jazz in the broadest sense, including blues, Latin and world music, on Salt Spring Island. Our purpose is to provide a platform for local and visiting artists that will nurture the local musical community and promote these genres of music on our island, reaching audiences of all ages and backgrounds.
meet our board of directors!
Dr. Brian Finnemore (President): Brian got turned on to jazz at the tender age of 15 when he heard "Little Jazz" Roy Eldridge perform with Gene Krupa's big band in a Vancouver hockey arena. From that moment on, he was caught up in the bebop movement of the 50's and 60's, dressed in drapes and dark glasses a la the other hep cats and was fortunate to hear Woody Herman, Charlie Barnett, Stan Kenton, and a host of other great musicians of that era. He subsequently became addicted to the music of John Lewis, Lennie Tristano and Bill Evans among the panoply of great improvisers. A retired family physician, he will in his next life return as a piano player.
John Moore (Secretary): John's start in jazz goes back to high school in Winnipeg, playing bari sax in a semi-traditional band. After a long musical drought as a geology professor, he again expresses his love of music through playing tenor with Bandemonium Music Society's Swing Shift big band, singing eclectic choral repertoire with Salt Spring Singers. His fresh harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary for jazz word-smithing has been the Society's anchor for many of our reviews and articles.
Valerie Short (Treasurer): Val has a varied professional background in the banking and credit union world, with a fine "ear" for financial detail. Her mainstream jazz interests and warm, personal touch keep us from floating too far from a view of the bottom line.
Hannah Brown: Our "Yiddische Mama" has lent her voice, creativity and sensitivity to myriad community groups (not to mention her home to a variety of touring musicians). A former Toronto school teacher, she is a rising blues singer and in the process of teaching our islanders that one "should not go where the path may lead, but go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
Margaretha Nordine: beloved wife and mother to jazz players, Margaretha is a community force: founder of the Island Pathways cycle and walking path advocates and a sweet (but firm) stage manager to a host of local productions.
Carol Tabbers: with a background in the Canadian foreign service, Carol experienced the musical traditions of Ghana, Egypt, Japan and Belgium before retiring to an active volunteer life on Salt Spring. A long-standing mainstream jazz fanatic, she helped the Society in many ways before coming on the Board.
Michael Wall: Mike attributes his life-long addiction to jazz music to the influence of a Brubeck-loving elementary school teacher, and a dependence on saxophone playing which persists to this day. Fortunately a career in industrial design has allowed him to support this habit, but his recent decline into pusher of jazz on the board of the Society gang was, sadly, inevitable. He has survived in the island's seedy underground jazz culture for over 20 years.