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"The Basketball Game" is a graphic novel adaptation of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada animated short of the same name – intended for audiences aged 12 years and up. It's a poignant tale of the power of community as a means to rise above hatred and bigotry. In the end, as is recognized by the kids playing the basketball game, we're all in this together.

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Tag: Jessica Stuart

Beckow’s music will live on

Beckow’s music will live on

Joan Beckow, left, Wendy Bross Stuart, centre, and Jessica Stuart, during a visit a few years ago. (photo from Jessica Stuart)

Acknowledging that the music world is “a fickle one in which skill, talent and ingenuity do not necessarily result in widespread acknowledgement or musical reach,” Jessica Stuart said Joan Beckow’s “music deserves to be heard. It deserves to be performed and played for many generations to come, and it is more than good enough to stand next to the work of Leonard Bernstein or Stephen Sondheim.”

Stuart and her mother, Wendy Bross Stuart – accomplished musicians in their own right – are co-directors of the Joan Beckow Project. Stuart is also project manager and producer of the project. Arts administrator Rosie Callaghan handles many of the behind-the-scenes details.

Beckow passed away on Jan. 13, 2021, at age 88. She was a close family friend of the Stuarts, and she and Bross Stuart collaborated professionally for more than 40 years. Jessica Stuart grew up surrounded by Beckow’s music, both because her mother and Beckow had worked together and because Stuart has performed a large body of Beckow’s work. The seeds of the Joan Beckow Project were planted in 2015, when Stuart discovered that none of Beckow’s music was available online and almost none of her choral or musical theatre music had ever been professionally recorded or transcribed. Beckow gave Stuart her blessing for the project.

Beckow started her career with a music degree from the University of California at Los Angeles. At UCLA, she composed six original musicals for the theatre department, where she collaborated with her friend, Carol Burnett. Beckow was resident composer and music director for the Stumptown Players, out of San Francisco, and, when she graduated, she started composing for Holiday Theatre L.A.

Eventually, Beckow found her way to Vancouver, where she worked with many theatres as a composer and music director, including the Playhouse, Carousel and Belfry theatres, as well as with the Shaw Festival. With Bross Stuart, she composed several musicals and, in 2002, It’s All in the Song, a summary of Beckow’s work, premièred at the Chutzpah! Festival.

photo - Joan Beckow, right, with Carol Burnett, in 1958
Joan Beckow, right, with Carol Burnett, in 1958. (photo from Jessica Stuart)

Beckow’s resumé also includes a degree in music therapy from Capilano College, where she was faculty for 10 years. And, over a 25-year period, she wrote original material for the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver’s Gotta Sing! Gotta Dance! theatre program for youth.

“Part of the reason I think it’s so important to record Joan’s work for the first time, is that, although her pieces have a natural beauty and intuitive sound, on paper (literally, the musical scores), her pieces look very complicated,” Stuart told the Independent. “Many of her songs cycle through multiple musical keys and several time signatures in one piece and I strongly believe that, if we want choral directors, vocalists and instrumentalists to choose this music to perform, they need the chance to listen and fall in love with it first.”

Beckow wrote hundreds of compositions, and Stuart and her mother started talking about song selection long before the project officially started.

“How does one sum up a composer’s career in one album? Well, we decided that we couldn’t, so we made it a double disc,” said Stuart. “One disc will focus on Joan’s musical theatre material, and the other will focus on her classical and sacred music, including many pieces set to text from the Jewish liturgy. There will be 22 pieces in total.”

Also part of the project is a 25-minute documentary, directed by Stuart’s father, Ron Stuart, in collaboration with editor Carlos Coronado.

“We applied to the Canada Council for the Arts, to the Concept to Realization program, in which we were able to define the scope of our project activities to include more than just an album recording,” said Jessica Stuart. “We wanted to tell the story of Joan’s life, culminating in the present-day recording of her debut album, albeit posthumous.”

In addition to the Canada Council support, the project has received support from the Ontario Arts Council and from Beckow’s son, David Beckow. But such undertakings are expensive. This one involves 30 musicians, and recording sessions in both Vancouver, where Bross Stuart lives, and Toronto, where Stuart is based.

“Even with the arts councils’ generous contributions, this massive undertaking still requires more financial support and, with some of this music having waited 70 years to be recorded for the first time, cutting corners is not an option we’re willing to consider,” writes Stuart on the Indiegogo fundraiser page.

As part of the project, Beckow’s songs have been “lush[ed] out.”

“Joan wrote most of her pieces for piano and voices, and the piano accompaniment always felt very orchestral, so adding strings, woodwinds and percussion felt completely natural and somehow brought even more emotional levity to the pieces,” explained Stuart. “The arrangements were done by Wendy and I, separately, but then requiring approval from each other before signing off. We agreed that these arrangements needed to keep a focus on Joan’s actual writing, instead of letting our imaginations run too wild, and we stuck to that. The results are quite wonderful!”

photo - Joan Beckow, in the late 1950s
Joan Beckow, in the late 1950s. (photo from Jessica Stuart)

As for the vocal contributors to the project, Stuart said, “The main consideration here was about getting the right voices for the right pieces. Wendy hired the personnel involved in the musical theatre portion of the album, which took place in Vancouver at Bryan Adam’s recording studio, the Warehouse.

“When I first conceived of this project,” she said, “I recognized that Joan’s classical and sacred music somehow had a kinship with jazz in terms of harmony, so I was eager to get the material into the hands of some of my favourite jazz musicians and improvisers based in Toronto. When choosing the personnel in Toronto, I went for both classical and jazz musicians, and even arranged a few pieces with sections earmarked for improvised solos. As suspected, not only did the music lend itself exceptionally well to improvisation, but Joan’s music had the Toronto jazz scene completely enamoured, and kind of in a tizzy, which was a real pleasure to watch.”

One of Stuart’s longtime favourite Beckow pieces is “Dwelling Places.”

“Joan once told me that she never wanted a harmony to simply exist as an ornament to a melody – that a harmony should be able to stand alone even if the melody were removed,” explained Stuart. “That, to me, is a profound idea, and I’ve always admired the myriad moving lines Joan was able to work into one piece concurrently within the accompaniment and vocal parts of her work. These lines lead you emotionally from one place to another, seamlessly, and all of sudden you have goosebumps and don’t even know why.

“Also, whether Joan was setting her own lyrics, or else poetry by Dorothy Parker, or else Jewish liturgical text, like ‘Dwelling Places,’ to music, she had an incredible gift for being able to mirror spoken cadence and intonation within her melodies.”

Stuart continued, “A new favourite of mine, though, discovered through the process of working on the Joan Beckow Legacy Project, is what I refer to as her ‘instant Christmas classic,’ called ‘A Christmas Wish.’ This is a song that stands up next to ‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire (The Christmas Song),’ and you can’t help but to imagine Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra’s voice all over it. And I’m sure we’re all aware of the long-standing tradition of Jewish songwriters creating the best Christmas music, so it’s time we added a female composer’s take to the mix!”

For anyone wanting to know more about the Joan Beckow Legacy Project, there are regular posts on Facebook and Instagram. To contribute to the project via Indiegogo and watch a short video about it, visit igg.me/at/joanbeckowlegacy. There is a six-level range of incentives for donors, from a personal social media shoutout for a $25 gift, to a personal thank you in the liner notes of the album – and all the goodies of the prior levels – for a $1,000 contribution.

Format ImagePosted on April 8, 2022April 8, 2022Author Cynthia RamsayCategories MusicTags history, Indiegogo, Jessica Stuart, Joan Beckow, legacy, Ron Stuart, Wendy Bross-Stuart
The search for a friend

The search for a friend

Finding Fukue follows Jessica Stuart’s journey to Japan to find her childhood friend.

screenshot - Finding Fukue follows Jessica Stuart’s journey to Japan to find her childhood friend
(screenshot)

To what lengths would you go to find a childhood friend whose letters stopped coming decades ago? When online searches proved fruitless, Vancouver-born, Toronto-based musician Jessica Stuart headed back to Japan, and her journey is recorded in the CBC Short Docs film Finding Fukue, which was produced with Real Stories. Since posted to YouTube last November, the charming and moving documentary has been viewed more than 3.6 million times to date.

“When I was 9 years old, my parents got English teaching jobs and moved us all to Japan for a year,” shares Stuart as the film starts. Among the images we see are clips of home movies from that year, 1988. “I was a blond kid, and that made me of interest to all the Japanese people because they had never really seen a blond-hair person before,” she says. “They would point at me or my sister, touch my hair, talk at me; I didn’t understand anything yet. The day after we arrived, I went to school for the first time and then that was crazy. I didn’t feel that anyone was interested in getting to know me, except for one person, and her name was Fukue, and we became best of friends.”

The Stuarts – Wendy, Ron and daughters Fiona and Jessica – settled in Saku, then a small rural village with no foreigners. Now, however, Stuart has to start looking for her friend Fukue in a city of 100,000 people. She visits the elementary school they attended and gets a yearbook, where she gets Fukue’s father’s name and an address from the year 2000, but this leads her to a new development, where she and her translator (for the more complex encounters) meet some women who remember her family but can’t help with finding Fukue.

At Saku City Hall, a press contingent meets Stuart and she gets the word out on television and in print. Finally, a clerk at City Hall manages to find a phone number for Fukue’s sister, who connects the two friends. The reunions – first by phone and then in person – are quite emotional. The two fall into a familiar comfort and get reacquainted. They have kept in touch since.

The approximately 21-minute film can be found at youtu.be/ZVlZMOB-Sq0.

Format ImagePosted on June 28, 2019June 26, 2019Author Cynthia RamsayCategories TV & FilmTags Canada, CBC, documentary, friendship, Fukue, Japan, Jessica Stuart
Song video showcases artists

Song video showcases artists

On Aug. 31, the video for the song “Same Girl” premièred. From the Jessica Stuart Few’s latest CD, The Passage, the song features a “girls’ chorus” that includes some of Jessica Stuart’s teenage guitar students joining her on the melody. The two-minute, 36-second video was filmed in and around Toronto, in its alleyways.

“The directing duo KAJART and I started shooting the video in late April, and shot almost every weekend until early August – over 120 hours of shooting over 1,000 locations in Toronto!” said Stuart. The stop-motion music video is her third collaboration with KAJART, “and we love each other and work incredibly well together!” she said, noting that the other two videos are for the songs “Twice” and for “Passage.”

The recent video premièred on blogTO and had more than 54,000 views and 244 shares at press time. On Sept. 1, it was released on YouTube, and has more than 1,200 views so far. On the YouTube post, watchers are invited to help tag the artists of the more than 400 urban art pieces featured in the video.

Noting that school has just started, Stuart told the Independent that the song is “pretty topical.” Its first lyrics, she said, are “Started off we were going to school – half is classes, half life lessons. I don’t care if we’re learning the rules, I’m always the same, always the same girl.”

The song itself (music, lyrics) was composed and performed by Stuart, who sings and plays the koto (a 13-stringed Japanese harp). She is joined by Charles James (double bass), Jon Foster (drums), Tony Nesbitt-Larking (backing koto), Michael Davidson (vibraphone) and the chorus of Jocelyn Barth, Michelle Willis, Alex Rozenberg, Astrid Granville-Martin, Keira Brody and Bernice Chan.

To view the video and download/order the album on which it appears, visit jessicastuartmusic.com.

Format ImagePosted on September 15, 2017September 14, 2017Author Cynthia RamsayCategories MusicTags Jessica Stuart, KAJART, Toronto, urban art
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