Love of music has guided English professor’s long career
Music has been an enduring and powerful influence in Professor Ajay Heble’s life. “I grew up in a very musical household. My dad was a classical Indian musician,” said Heble. “He played sitar and was a classical Indian vocalist. He was very actively involved [in the community] even though he was a professor of mathematics.”
Sometimes, concerts took place in their very own home. “At the time I didn’t think anything of it,” said Heble. “I thought ‘Oh these are just things that happen,’ but in fact, now I realize they were very special. These were amazing, world-class musicians who happened to [play] concerts in my parents’ house.”
This momentum continued into his teenage years when he was given the opportunity to study composition with Toronto classical composer Philip McConnell. In high school, Heble was studying music at a university level. This class also allowed him to connect with a small community of like-minded students to share music, perform, and grow. It proved to be a formative experience.
Though Heble’s academic career began in literary criticism, music always guided his perception. While completing his PhD at the University of Toronto, he proposed a dissertation on critical theory and jazz. Despite being rejected at the time, Heble would publish this project later under the title Landing on the Wrong Note. In the meantime, he wrote his dissertation on Canadian short story writer Alice Munro, who later won the Nobel Prize. “I like to joke that I was going to write on ‘the absence of jazz in Alice Munro,’” said Heble.
Having finished his PhD in Toronto, Heble applied to teach in the English department at the University of Guelph. He was interviewed by the then-chair of the department Connie Rooke, who also co-founded the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival.
“I think I probably made some offhand comment [like] ‘I think I want to start a jazz festival…’ I suspect that’s why she hired me,” said Heble.
Rooke hired Heble, and in 1994 he started the Guelph Jazz Festival. At this point, it was purely an extracurricular endeavour, but that was soon to change.
1996 saw the advent of the Jazz Festival Colloquium, a series of talks and workshops. “I felt that the Colloquium helped to build an audience for this music…. Audience members who may be unfamiliar with the music get to hear the artists speak about it.” Heble’s academic work gained a community focus.
Now into its third decade, the Guelph Jazz Festival eventually allowed Heble to expand his research to form the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI). “We now have about 40 community partners ranging from music festivals to art galleries to social service organizations that run programs for at-risk and aggrieved populations,” said Heble.
Heble just received a grant of $2.03 million from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) to build an “ImprovLab” on campus. “I’m imagining it as a roughly 300-seat facility with state-of-the-art technology to enable real-time musical performance across geographical distance.”
This facility would also bridge the distance between academia and the community. “This would be a publicly-accessible, multi-use lab for presentation, broadcast, archiving, and analysis of improvised music and artistic practice across a variety of artistic media. I imagine it to be a kind of hub where artists and community collaborators can come into contact with each other.”
Communities flourish when individuals listen and respond to one another: skills which are necessary to improvisation. “I think that people are too focused on their own sense of individual autonomy. We don’t pay enough attention to what is going on around us,” said Heble. “I think letting go of that a little bit is really important.”
Photo by Brady Patterson.