Canadian Jazz Opera in America Katherine McLeod (bio) I'd love to hear your fingers minuet, Colette.Alight by me, dove; let's debut a duet —From Québécité libretto (28) On the snowy night of 18 February 2009, the scintillating sounds of a Canadian jazz opera Québécité—written by George Elliott Clarke and composed by D.D. Jackson—filled Foy Hall in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Sponsored by the Moravian College Music Institute, along with the Moravian College Office of Institutional Diversity and Multicultural Affairs and Moravian College of Arts and Letters, Québécité had its American debut in this quiet city, a three-hour drive west of New York City. The proximity is important both in terms of Moravian College's decision to produce the performance (as Jackson had previously performed at the Music Institute) and the fact that Jackson, the singers, and the musicians are all performers based in New York City (a few of whom [Jackson and Choi] are New York-Canadians). Thus, while Québécité has yet to have a New York City debut, or a Quebec City debut for that matter (which only highlights the significance of geographical location in the politics of this piece), one might consider this Bethlehem performance to be, indeed, a New York performance on an interpretive level. At the very least one must take into account that all performers are immersed in the New York jazz scene when listening to the already complex adaptive politics taking place within this Canadian jazz opera that is about multicultural sound. Québécité premiered at the tenth anniversary of the Guelph Jazz Festival on 5 September 2003. Commissioned by Ajay Heble, the performance was directed by Colin Taylor and featured a full cast of musicians, singers, and dancers. It was performed again in Vancouver (October 2003) with a scaled-down production but with the same cast of singers (Dean Bowman as Malcolm States, Yoon Choi as Colette Chan, Kiran Ahluwalia as Laxmi Bharati, and Haydain Neale as Ovide Rimbaud) and many of the same musicians (D.D. Jackson himself on piano, John Geggie on bass, Peggy Lee on cello, Jean Martin on drums, and Brad Turner on trumpet; with one change being Mark Dresser on bass in Vancouver). In the same year, Clarke published the libretto, Québécité: A Jazz Fantasia in Three Cantos, which reads as a poetic performance attentive to its own musicality through language. From the opening duet, Ovide exclaims, "I could scat sing my ballad valentine!" and Laxmi later critiques Ovide for speaking in "[s]uch symphonic speech"; these examples only gesture towards the richness of Clarke's poetry as it overflows the textual space of the libretto. The libretto has been delivered as a dramatic reading under the direction of Jessica Ruano and performed by Greg Frankson, Supinder Kaur, Emmanuel Jean-Simon, and Candace Cheung (Ottawa Fringe Festival 2006). (An early draft of the libretto was published in Canadian Theatre Review Fall 2002 and it has been anthologized by Djanet Sears in Testifyin': Contemporary African Canadian Drama Vol. II.) In October 2003, the Guelph performance was broadcasted on CBC Radio Two's In Performance, which included a pre-performance interview with Clarke and Jackson; however, there has not yet been a commercial recording of the music that would allow it to reach a wider audience. Significantly, not only is there no commercial recording, but, until Bethlehem, there had not been a full musical performance since Guelph and Vancouver in 2003. Therefore, the Bethlehem performance provided an important re-interpretation of the piece both on its own and in relation to the 'original' productions. In the article, "This Ain't No Time for Innocence: Québécité, a Jazz Opera by George Elliott Clarke and D.D. Jackson," Kevin McNeilly offers astute comparisons between the Guelph and Vancouver performances, along with an excellent overview of the personal background and political concerns of the jazz opera. In making these comparisons, McNeilly observes that "[t]he Guelph staging emphasized contrivance and artifice […] This excess created the impression, not of plurality, but of clutter, and usually interfered with the drama and the music" (118). In many ways...