A lifelong love of music leads Jarrett Martineau to the Chan Centre, as new curator-in-residence
The nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) and Dene Sųłiné artist, producer, scholar, and storyteller, has big ideas for genre-crossing collaborations at the UBC space
Jarrett Martineau. Photo by Vanessa Heins
YOU KNOW THAT feeling you get when you discover a new song that you fall in love with on first listen, something that just grabs you and you can’t wait to share it with the people around you? In a very basic sense, that’s what Jarrett Martineau does for work. It’s not quite so straightforward, of course. A nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) and Dene Sųłiné producer, artist, scholar, and storyteller, Martineau is the newly appointed curator-in-residence at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts at the University of British Columbia. There, his programming will be focused on uplifting Black and Indigenous voices; hosting a diverse range of artists, including icons, new talent, emerging and established international and local musicians, those who explore pressing issues in their music, and those who tell stories.
Consider how things sometimes unfold for the music lover in the most magical of ways. Over the last year and a half or so, prior to taking on his new position, the artist Martineau had been listening to the most was Arooj Aftab. The boundary-breaking New York-based singer-songwriter is the first Pakistani artist to win a Grammy and perform at the illustrious event; earlier this year, she spoke alongside President Joe Biden at the White House celebration of Eid al-Fitr. Martineau had discovered her album, Vulture Prince, before the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences came calling.
“I didn’t know anything about her before I listened to the album, and I was like ‘This is the best thing I’ve heard in years,’” Martineau says in a Zoom interview with Stir. “I just was so, so struck by the music, by the beauty of it, and couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
Aftab is coming to the Chan Centre for the 2022 Indian Summer Festival, marking her Vancouver debut and Martineau’s first curatorial contribution in his new role. To say he’s excited would be an understatement.
“It’s amazing to me,” Martineau says. “It’s such a wonderful story to see her career taking off right at the time we have an opportunity to bring her here for the first time. I mean, I'm just so thrilled that that's going to be the first concert I get to present.”
The 2022-23 season at the Chan Centre—its 25th anniversary season—features a knockout, diverse roster. Highlights of the Chan Presents series include “beat scientist” Makaya McCraven, a creative visionary shaping the future of jazz who will present the Vancouver premiere of his forthcoming new album, In These Times, and kick off his fall tour at the Chan on October 15; Grammy-winning Oumou Sangaré, who’s known as the “Songbird of Wassoulou” and is one of Africa’s most venerated international stars (October 23); and Afropop superstar Fatoumata Diawara (April 14), known for her joyful, exuberant and political music, to name just a few.
Martineau’s position as curator-in-residence is the culmination of decades immersed in music, personally and professionally.
With a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Indigenous Governance from the University of Victoria, Martineau is the host, creator, and producer of Reclaimed, CBC's first-ever Indigenous music series. He has worked across the arts and cultural sector and curated with international partners ranging from SXSW, Luminato, and PuSH International Performing Arts Festival, to the Toronto International Film Festival and imagineNATIVE. He created and produced the award-winning Indigenous documentary series RISE for VICELAND and co-founded the global Indigenous music platform Revolutions Per Minute as well as the media arts and electronic music-focused New Forms Festival in Vancouver. Most recently, he served as the City of Vancouver’s inaugural music officer, where he amplified IBPOC voices (and curated Sound of the City, a partnership between The City of Vancouver and Stir highlighting local music). His scholarly research and writing explore decolonial practices that pursue new pathways in Indigenous resurgence through the arts.
His love of music goes back as far as he can remember. Having grown up between Vancouver and Alberta, with a few years in Montreal to study at McGill University, he was entrenched in Vancouver’s underground-music scene as a hip-hop and spoken-word artist in his early 20s. He spent evenings listening to bands at clubs along Richards, Homer, and Pender Streets that are now all but gone.
Jarrett Martineau. Photo via CBC
An omnivorous researcher and reader, he finds new music anywhere he can, through books, articles, podcasts, friends, and beyond. Among the titles on his current reading list are Patti Smith’s Year of the Monkey, William Brewer’s Red Arrow, and Jonathan Crary’s Scorched Earth. On current rotation, he’s listening to Kokoroko, Kendrick Lamar, Joe Rainey, and Shabaka Hutchings, to name just a few.
During the pandemic’s lockdown days, Martineau started experimenting with long-form, narrative playlists, turning to Spotify, and trying to hack the algorithm so that the streaming platform wouldn’t spit out expected listening suggestions. “I would try to get at the stuff that it wouldn't automatically give me or auto-populate for me,” Martineau says. “The vast majority of artists that are on these streaming platforms are not getting billions and billions of streams. They’re out there, but most of them have a small following. So how do you even find that stuff?
“I follow music news, DJs, online radio stations, and awards shows. I really just try to keep track at a high level of as much as global stuff as I can, areas that are outside of my own interests,” he says. “I love listening as widely as possible to get a sense of what’s pulsing up from other places.”
It’s an especially interesting time to be stepping into a new curatorial role at the Chan Centre for a few reasons, not least of which is the fact that we’re coming out of a pandemic, and everyone has different comfort levels in terms of booking and planning travel far in advance. Then there is his goal of reaching new audiences, people who may have been to one or two shows at the stunning state-of-the-art venue, if at all.
Buffy Sainte-Marie’s concert is part of a larger festival in September, which will be presented ahead of this year’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. The gathering will celebrate Indigenous culture and community and will feature performances by artists from the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, as well as Indigenous musicians and dance groups from across Turtle Island. (More details are forthcoming.)
Other highlights of the Chan Presents series include concerts by guest curators. Sri Lankan composer, conductor, and pianist Dinuk Wijeratne oversees two concerts: tabla player Sandeep Das on February 18 and The Journeyed Compass, featuring Wijeratne himself, on May 5.
Pianist David Fung, newly appointed associate professor of piano at the UBC School of Music selected Billboard chart-topping piano duo Anderson & Roe to perform on March 4, programming specifically dedicated to the Chan Centre’s recently acquired Steinway Spirio piano.
Literary talks, film screenings, theatre happenings, and other events will be taking place, formats that fall outside of the category of “concert”, “cross-pollination between different disciplines or between different communities that might not have historically had a chance to be showcased at the Chan”, Martineau says, hinting at much more detail to come. “I feel like it’s part of the bridge-building work that I have an opportunity to begin, and to support.
“The way I think about successful programming is in the spirit of collaboration,” he says. “That kind of thing can sound trite, but I really mean that. Especially in our city where we are still relatively small, whenever we can fortify each other and figure out if there’s an opportunity to do something mutually, where everybody can benefit, or to pool shared resources to bring an artist that maybe any one of our organizations wouldn't otherwise be able to support, that feels like something we should try. And if we do it together, then we might get a more interesting audience experience too.”
Martineau is also programming an innovative new series for the Chan’s anniversary season that will mark a departure from the main Chan Presents programming. It’s called EXP, and it will showcase genre-defying artists at the vanguard of sonic creativity. The first musician announced in this series is the critically acclaimed post-classical musician and composer Nils Frahm, a co-presentation with Timbre Concerts in April 2023. Frahm has just announced an expansive new album, Music For Animals, featuring 10 tracks and clocking in at over three hours long. His Vancouver concert will be one of only two Canadian stops. The Chan Centre EXP series will announce more artists this summer.
Martineau also hopes to make more use of the Chan’s Telus Studio Theatre, a “cool black box space” somewhat akin to London’s Globe Theatre, with three tiers of seating that can be reconfigured, an intimate, experimental space to program standalone events and concerts. It has a capacity of about 175 to 300, compared to the Chan’s main hall, which seats around 1,100 people.
Then there will be collaborations with UBC partners like the new Centre for Climate Justice at UBC, founded by Naomi Klein. Martineau hopes to find ways to explore the topic of the climate crisis by bringing together artists, musicians, and scientists.
You can bet that it’s all just the beginning.
“My predisposition is to be inquisitive about things that I find interesting and to find out ‘What have I not heard before? What have I not seen and read before?’ And usually if I have an experience that is resonant for me, I want to share it immediately with people, and I think that is the spirit of how I think about doing this kind of curatorial work,” Martineau says. “In this role, that happens to lead to an event. But it could be another form too. What I’m interested in is the experience—of being together in the same room with that space to share.
His favourite place during a concert is being at the threshold between backstage and sidestage, where he can see the musicians performing while also watching the response from the audience. “There’s a kind of communion that happens: the artists are expressing themselves in a way that is true to them and an audience is experiencing the thrill of that moment in real time…and when it all comes together, everyone gets to be part of that joy and discovery. And those are the kinds of moments I live for—to just let it all go and get lost in the soundwaves.”
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