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Jazz fest's pop-up venue an experiment in sound design and architecture

The Winnipeg International Jazz Festival prides itself on being a downtown event with Old Market Square serving as its hub for six days of free concerts and headlining acts filling venues such as the Burton Cummings Theatre and the Centennial Concert Hall.

But this year, the festival is expanding its boundaries by collaborating with RAW:Gallery to create RAW:JazzFest, a pop-up venue just outside of the downtown borders in St. Boniface at Parc Elzéar Goulet on Taché Avenue overlooking the Red River.  

"It felt like a unique opportunity to create a concert experience for Winnipeggers that they haven’t had before, and to also kind of be part of making a cool building. There’s unique value in that," says jazz fest artistic director Mike Falk.

"We love having music in small spaces; I think that when people are crushed together a bit more their kinetic energy bounces around and makes for good shows, so I think with this project it’s definitely designed to both animate the space and animate the people, and have some fun, as well."

National Newspaper Week recognizes efforts of the journalists keeping small-town papers alive

On the evening of Oct. 14, 2007, the Cartwright Community Centre arena burned to the ground.

Fondly referred to as the Clipperdome, it was a communal space in the small Manitoba town of Cartwright, about 180 kilometers southwest of Winnipeg. It was especially lively in the winter, when the hockey arena was a busy hub for locals to connect, many of whom were members or knew members of the Cartwright Clippers senior hockey team.

“Sorrow” was the word Vicki Wallace — the editor, publisher and sole reporter of Cartwright weekly newspaper the Southern Manitoba Review — used when describing the fire and the community’s response.

“I’ll tell you right now, you made me cry,” she told a Free Press reporter when recalling the time.

Researchers aim to help teachers de-stress

For Cori Wiebe, teaching math using online tools is getting a little bit easier every day.

At the same time, work is even more difficult — every day classes are suspended, she misses her students more.

“I’d love to be back in the classroom to have that social contact. (The distance) does make you appreciate what you had,” said Wiebe, a Grade 6-7 math teacher at Westdale School, before starting to cry during an interview about her last five weeks on the job, away from her 120 students.

Rallies, moments of silence honor George Floyd a year later

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A family-friendly street festival, musical performances and moments of silence were held Tuesday to honor George Floyd and mark the year since he died at the hands of Minneapolis police, a death captured on wrenching bystander video that galvanized the racial justice movement and continues to bring calls for change a year later.

Floyd’s sister Bridgett and other family members held a moment of silence at a “Celebration of Life” event at a downtown Minneapolis park that included music, food trucks, an inflatable bouncy house and a pop-up vaccination stand.

A few miles away, at the site of the intersection where Floyd died, dozens of people gathered around a steel fist sculpture and kneeled for several minutes — symbolic of the 9 minutes, 29 seconds during which Floyd was pinned to the ground.

“It’s been a troubling year, a long year,” Bridgett Floyd told the crowd in downtown Minneapolis. “But we made it. ... The love is very outpouring today. The love is here. George is here."

Ignoring the facts makes for a better budget story

In Premier Brian Pallister's world, the public accounts for the 2019-2020 fiscal year serve as the ultimate good news story.

The final accounting of government revenues and expenditures, the public accounts show a small surplus of $5 million. According to Pallister, this was accomplished without much pain for Manitobans, who can now share in the knowledge that finally, mercifully, the books are balanced.

Of course, in accentuating the positive, Pallister had to ignore a few things.

Such as tens of thousands of government workers who have gone without a pay increase for three years. And a health-care system that, despite an influx of funds last year, continues to suffer from three years of crippling underfunding. And infrastructure spending that has been cut back by hundreds of millions of dollars. And an education system in chaos from the dual pressures of austerity and pandemic upheaval.

Dropping the gloves to make the point

In hockey parlance, it’s called “shedding,” the moment in a game when you are forced to deal with an instigator by dropping (shedding) your gloves for an all-out brawl.

That term is a deep cut from hockey culture that Prime Minister Mark Carney — he of the “elbows up” phenomenon — may need to not only embrace but practise more often in the face of yet another round of overly punitive tariffs imposed by United States President Donald Trump.

To be fair, under Carney’s leadership, Canada has not exactly rolled over in the face of Trump’s bully-boy tactics.

Yes, Canada has made concessions to placate Trump to further a new continental trade agreement: investing more money to combat the cross-border flow of fentanyl that isn’t actually happening, stalling efforts to tax streaming companies as most European countries already do, and — most recently — giving Trump a cut of profits from the Canadian-made, Canadian-paid Gordie Howe bridge between Windsor and Detroit.