If Paris is “the city of lights”, then without question Montreal is the city of festivals.  And the one festival that best demonstrates this has to be Montreal’s world renowned jazz festival, the “Festival International de Jazz de Montreal”.  Of course, this year’s event was certainly bigger than previous ones as the festival was celebrating its 30th anniversary of bringing this musical genre out onto the streets of Montreal and into the various clubs and theatres throughout the city.  But the festival’s organizers were not the only ones celebrating a major milestone with this year’s edition of the jazz festival.  In fact, this year’s festival also marked my 20th consecutive year of attending this amazing celebration of the world of jazz.  And just as the jazz festival itself has evolved over the years, so too has my own personal experiences being an attendee of this event.

Walking around this year’s festival grounds, I couldn’t help but reminisce about how I first started attending this event as Click here to continue reading »”Jazz and Montreal – Celebrating a Major Milestone”

As some of you may have noticed, I haven’t been writing much in my blog here lately and I fault that on the fact that I’ve been busy writing in another medium – music.  As I mentioned in a previous entry, I’m directing/producing my second episode for the amateur-based science-fiction series “Star Trek Unity”.  Production on the latest episode, “Disunity, Part 2” wrapped up at the end of August and much of my off-hours time has been spent knee deep in post-production work. While I learned the ropes of post-production working on “Disunity”, this time round I’ve added another new challenge to the mix – instead of utilizing cinematic scores written for other works, I plan on using music written specifically for this episode. Of course, the twist to this new approach is that I’m taking on the role of the composer who’ll create these original music compositions. Click here to continue reading »”I’ll Be Right Back . . . After This Musical Interlude”