I have been invited to take part in this special concert and memorial in Montreal on October 4 to honour my former teacher and mentor Jan Jarczyk. First, I’d like to tell a bit about him and how he was such an important influence in our lives. Then I hope you might consider joining my Patreon page as a paid subscriber for a month to help me get to Montreal

https://www.patreon.com/moniknordine

I met Jan in September, 1993 when I arrived at McGill to start my Masters degree. At the time, he was the chair of the Masters program in Jazz Studies, so me and my student cohort all had him as our advisor. He was also our composition teacher and for some he was a piano instructor as well. He assigned our courses and checked our compositions. Jan basically held our hands and made sure we graduated – not that he wanted to get rid of us – but he did want us to finish. Jan always made time for us and was available to perform with us if we asked him to do gigs off campus, he was always willing. He did several $30 gigs with me while I was a student, which for me was a schooling in itself. While he maintained his own teaching and performing career, as well as his home life, he also made time to be personally involved with his students. Maybe that’s why he talked so fast and also why he was so fast playing through the students’ compositions: he played the assignments so fast that I think all of us students came out of the office a bit dazed and wide-eyed. He genuinely cared about us and liked to spend time with us. Because I was far from home it was helpful to have a teacher like him who seemed to care. After we finished our studies many of us went out on cruise ships as musicians to pay our students loans. We sent post cards to Jan from distant lands, and he posted some of them on his office door. Later when I went on to have my own teaching and performing career I kept in touch with Jan and would sometimes call him with questions and performed with him in Montreal in 2007. That was the last time I saw him. I was living in Victoria and was busy with my career and family and it was too difficult to get to Vancouver when he came in early 2014. In August that same year he was gone.

Since then, it has never ceased to amaze me at how many people knew about Jan. I went to hear a Polish jazz group performing in Victoria in around 2018. We ended up talking about Jan, as he was an inspiration to them as well. In 2017 when I recorded my third album, I dedicated it to him because without him I couldn’t have done the things I did in my life, at least not in the way that they happened. It was mainly just a feeling that he gave us, and for that I will always be grateful.