Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and good morning. I'll ask you to forgive me if I'm a little groggy today.
I'm the executive director of the Coastal Jazz and Blues Society, which produces the annual Vancouver International Jazz Festival as well as Winterruption on Granville Island, the Time Flies festival, and a series of concerts throughout the year.
My colleagues have spoken extensively to the value of arts and culture in these kinds of celebrations. What I want to talk to you about today is the legacy from these kinds of activities, in particular the long-term cultural legacy that goes far beyond the showcasing of the arts at the initial time of the event, that goes far beyond the long-term legacy of physical infrastructure projects.
Ironically, this actually ties quite well to our organization's history. If you'll allow me, I'd like to tell you a little bit of a story around that.
In 1986 Vancouver hosted Expo 86, an event that coincided with Vancouver's centennial anniversary. John Orysik, Ken Pickering, and Robert Kerr, along with a group of other music lovers and idealistic dreamers, launched the first Vancouver International Jazz Festival as part of the world's fair that year.
You can imagine what a thrill it was for them to showcase to the world some of the great Canadian talent that was residing in their hometown, along with such legends of the music world as Miles Davis, Bobby McFerrin, and Tito Puente. Together with Expo 86, they produced over 120 concerts in 23 locations, not only sharing the sense of pride and belonging that Expo generated but also developing the courage and inspiration to pursue their own vision of nurturing and presenting a uniquely Canadian voice to audiences both here and abroad.
Inspired by Expo 86, they secured their first major sponsor, and working with the city in a province that was now awakened to the limitless possibilities and opportunities of major civic events, they launched Vancouver's first major annual outdoor street festival in Gastown shortly after that, and built partnerships with Granville Island, the Roundhouse community centre, and a plethora of other civic and arts and cultural organizations.
Today we're the largest arts and cultural producer in B.C. The Vancouver International Jazz Festival has been acclaimed as one of the best in the world, showcasing over 1,800 musicians in 400 concerts, 150 of which are free. We draw over half a million people every year and have an economic impact of almost $18 million on the region.
I share this because we are the cultural legacy of Expo 86. Had it not been for Expo 86, organizations like ours wouldn't have existed. It's a legacy that continued on with the next major celebration in Vancouver, the 2010 Olympics and the accompanying three-year Cultural Olympiad--whose program director, incidentally, was Robert Kerr, one of the founders of the jazz festival and my predecessor.
That's another great example of a national celebration that spawned its own infrastructure and cultural legacies. We participated extensively in the Cultural Olympiad, bringing together, for instance, through our Sonic Genome project, renowned international and Canadian musicians to participate with local musicians and students in creating innovative jazz in a community centre environment over a period of 24 hours. You couldn't get a better presentation of community engagement and education than that.
We're asking you, as you develop plans for the 120th anniversary, to keep in mind building on platforms that exist today--platforms like our festivals--and also supporting emerging organizations. Who knows? The seeds of what happens in 2017 may very well blossom into tomorrow's cultural institutions and the incubators of the next generation of Canadian artists and cultural producers. We all know very well that it's through arts and culture that a nation can really inspire and capture the imagination of its people, weaving a narrative of its history and its communities and awakening its best ideals and dreams for the future.
My colleagues have spoken extensively about the value of arts and culture--the ability to position Canada as a brand and to really be able to showcase who we are to the world--but I'd like to speak a little bit more literally to our history.
Vancouver, for instance, has an extensive history of the interaction between jazz musicians who have played here and our development as a society--an ethnocultural society, a multicultural society--and the laws and segregation practices that have evolved over time around that. Vancouver has been home to some of the greatest musicians in the world--Jimmy Hendrix, Jelly Roll Morton--for very crucial times in their lives. The likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington regularly played here, and were able to come and play in the hotels, but they weren't able to stay there.
That is the kind of history most Canadians aren't aware of. Organizations like ours can present the literal version of Canada's histories through celebrations like 2017.
The 2017 celebrations offer us the opportunity to commission unique works to tell these kinds of literal stories, to allow Canadian artists to expand on their repertoires, and to showcase the kinds of unique neighbourhoods that exist in our cities. They can showcase once again to the world unique contemporary talents like Diana Krall, Ingrid Jensen, Nikki Yanofsky, and Michael Bublé that we've all nurtured through our various activities. It's a profound opportunity in which we'd very much like to participate.
There's also a series of archives, as Anita mentioned, that the jazz festival has access to, with decades of history of jazz in Vancouver. This kind of celebration provides a unique opportunity to digitize and share that across the country.
I'd like to end with the notion of cultural legacy and what can come out of the 150th anniversary celebrations. Please keep in mind that you are not only supporting the existing arts platforms and opportunities for Canadians to share their stories; you're really supporting the next series of organizations and cultural and artistic incubators of our identity that will be telling our stories for several generations to come.
Thank you.