Home » Jazz Musicians » Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra

Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra

Biography
Articles

The Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra (WJO) is Canada’s first community-based, non-profit professional jazz orchestra. Founded in 1997 (registered charity in 2000), the WJO has matured to become an important part of Winnipeg’s cultural landscape, reflected in the ongoing support the organization receives from the Manitoba Arts Council, the Winnipeg Arts Council, the Winnipeg Foundation, and other sponsors.

The mandate of the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra is to be an instrumental force in the promotion and development of big band jazz in Manitoba and beyond, through performance, composition, recording and education.

The WJO has been fulfilling this mandate in the following ways: 1. through the presentation of a regular concert series that reflects the diversity of approaches to big band performance and repertoire; 2. in hiring Manitoba’s best professional jazz musicians to make up the ensemble, and allowing for a rotation of personnel to bring in “up and coming musicians”; 3. by the presentation of the best big band jazz compositions and arrangements available; 4. through the commission of new compositions and arrangements for big band by Canadian and Manitoban composers (over 100 have been written for the WJO to date); 5. in our collaborations with national and international guest performers and conductors that have informed and developed the ensemble, musicians and audience; 6. through our educational outreach programs and projects: school ensembles perform at each WJO concert (pre-covid), our High School Honour Jazz Band project (a collaboration with Jazz Winnipeg Festival), and our big band workshops held in several Winnipeg schools; 7. through recording the ensemble and its original music (our 5th recording was just released this spring).

Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra: Tidal Currents: East Meets West

Read "Tidal Currents: East Meets West" reviewed by Jack Bowers

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.

Album Review

Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra: Voices: A Musical Heritage

Read "Voices: A Musical Heritage" reviewed by Jack Bowers

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.

Album Review

Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra: Suite 150 / A Big Band Portrait

Read "Suite 150 / A Big Band Portrait" reviewed by Jack Bowers

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 ...

204

Album Review

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 ...