Vancouver’s Juno-nominated Ostara Project champions women in jazz
The all-female collective headed by basist Jodi Proznick and pianist Amanda Tosoff performs at Vancouver International Jazz Festival
The Ostara Project.
The Vancouver International Jazz Festival presents the Ostara Project on June 25 at 7:30 pm at Performance Works
BY THE TIME the Ostara Project takes the Performance Works stage on June 25, its namesake’s favourite season will have passed. But is there ever a bad time for joy, creativity, and renewal? Jazz musicians Jodi Proznick and Amanda Tosoff would argue that there isn’t, and with their new, all-female band they intend to celebrate Ostara all year round.
The name, Proznick explains, stems from that of an ancient Germanic goddess associated with spring rituals, especially those associated with fertility. Unsurprisingly, the concept of Ostara was purloined and de-feminized by early Christians; it survives today as Easter.
As the 19th-century folklorist Jacob Grimm—yes, one of those Grimms—pointed out in his Deutsche Mythologie, “This Ostarâ, like the [Anglo-Saxon] Eástre, must in heathen religion have denoted a higher being, whose worship was so firmly rooted that the Christian teachers tolerated the name, and applied it to one of their own grandest anniversaries.”
For Proznick, though, Ostara is more of a personal lodestone. “She has been with me for a long time,” the bassist and educator says. “I got into the divine feminine as a concept probably around 10 years ago, and started to get into some of the mythology around goddesses and strong, fiery characters in history. I always had a fascination with people like Joan of Arc and Queen Elizabeth the First, and I’d just imagine ‘What was it like to be that at that time?’
“But I also wanted to find a character that spoke to renewal and rebirth and reimagining and creativity,” she continues. “Ostara is about springtime, it’s about fertility, about the idea of coming up from the ashes—the phoenix rising. So there’s an optimism there which I really appreciate; we need optimism these days!”
Proznick and Tosoff have long been friends, but hadn’t seen much of each other since the latter moved to Toronto in 2010. (The pianist teaches music at Humber College; the bassist heads the jazz program at the VSO School of Music.) The Covid pandemic offered them a chance to hang out online, and they soon realized that not only did they want to work more closely together, they needed to bring their female colleagues into the circle, too.
“We just sort of reconnected through an educational video that I’d posted and a workshop that she did that I attended,” Tosoff says. “We started up an online music-education company called the Music Arts Collective, and had so many great conversations about what we really want to see in education—and also about all these movements that were coming up during Covid, like Black Lives Matter and MeToo.”
They quickly decided that a good way to champion women in the Canadian jazz scene would be to assemble an all-star cast of their fellow player-composers, and that their hunch was correct when the Ostara Project’s eponymous debut was nominated for a 2023 Juno Award. They also found that working in an all-woman band had personal benefits.
“I’m going to quote what Esperanza Spalding said, or at least paraphrase it,” says Proznick. “She said that when she went to play with Geri Allen and Terri Lyne Carrington for the first time, she felt like all of a sudden she could take this armour off.
“I’m not going to generalize about men,” she continues, noting that she’s had nothing but positive experiences with her own male bandmates in other projects, “but there’s this vigilance that happens, especially as you’re working as a young woman in the scene. When you’re entering into situations with people you don’t know and trust, you immediately put your armour up. But when we were on tour with this group I really noticed the softening that can happen.
“I feel different,” she adds. “My playing is freer and I feel braver. I feel less constrained by what I think the other members of the band may want from me—and there’s a lot of joy that happens.”
Amanda Tosoff.
Both she and Tosoff agree that the plan now is to spread that joy. “Even though Jodi and I are the leaders, or the curators, this really is a collective,” the pianist says. “It’s hard to be a complete collective because there have to be some people leading the logistical stuff, but we want everyone’s voice. And everyone is such an amazing composer we want to showcase everybody’s music. That’s part of what makes the record and the band so special: everyone has a really distinct voice. When you bring it all together, there’s such diversity—and yet it all sort of works.”
And everybody means everybody. There’s a reason why the Ostara Project is a project and not a typical band: over time, Tosoff and Proznick want to work with as many great women in jazz as they can. The group we’ll see at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival isn’t the same as the one that vied for a Juno: Proznick, Tosoff, saxophonist Allison Au, and Rachel Therrien on trumpet remain from the original septet, while drummer Valérie Lacombe, singer-pianist Laila Biali, and singer Shruti Ramani have come on board. Even Proznick and Tosoff themselves are not necessarily irreplaceable, although they will be at the helm for the next round of studio sessions in November.
“This next record is a bit of a concept,” says Tosoff, hinting that the Ostara Project’s Vancouver International jazz Festival show will offer a preview of what to expect. “We’re going to dive into our own individual heritage and family background. For example, I know that Jodi’s going to be doing a piece based on a Ukrainian folksong. I’m of Bulgarian heritage, and so I’ve written a piece that’s sort of loosely based on a Bulgarian folk song, just taking some of the elements in that music and bringing them into jazz. So I think it’s all about ancestors, and about what it means to be Canadian.”
If being Canadian means honouring equity, diversity, creativity, and the spirit of renewal, this an only be a very good thing.
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