sheBOP! A Century of Jazz Compositions by Canadian Women
It all started with a simple comment, made by Gary Cristall, then at Canada Council, over coffee after a school show audition about six years ago. The details of that fateful conversation have become blurred by time, but the idea Gary was putting forth was, “Hey, why don’t you gals do a show devoted to Canadian women composers? You’d probably stand a good chance at getting some grant money.” Affording oneself the chance to work for nothing always sounds good to artists. Why not!? Besides, Wendy had been nagging us to do a show devoted to women and their music for a couple of years already.

Little did we know that we’d be embarking on a quest of no small proportion, unearthing treasures that had been forgotten for decades, encountering dead ends and ambiguity, hearing the stories of countless colourful characters and putting in more hours of research than we care to mention unless you’re buying us all a stiff drink.

Some compositions were easily decided upon and easily discovered…what show about Canadian women composers would be complete without something of Joni Mitchell’s forays into the world of jazz? Some decisions came less readily…can a “La Bolduc” composition really be called jazz? Sure it can, if we arrange it as such, and anyway, how can we not include this revolutionary songstress? And what about our contemporaries? Do we want to mention the host of present-day women who are creating music today? That was a difficult one, but in the end, we decided that those women in the limelight today are not in as much need of recognition as the scores of women who’ve been forgotten over time, or who never had much recognition even in their own eras. So we concentrated on the composers whom time and popular tastes had obscured, and on the more surprising titles.

The meetings were many, the discussions long and heated; but the result is sheBOP!- the story of some of our foremothers, just a few of the women who opened the door for us and inspired us to be who and where we are today.

sheBOP! premièred in the fall of 2001. Since then we have had the opportunity to introduce this great music to audiences from island communities off BC’s west coast to downtown Toronto. In 2003 we released sheBOP! on CD. The discovery of the contribution of Canadian women to jazz continues.