Of all the great musicians who have played at the jazz festival here—Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, Sonny Rollins, Oscar Peterson—not many will have heard of pianist George Wein. George who, you might ask?

Apart from his talent and achievements as a jazz musician, Wein’s vision as a music promoter has an awful lot to do with the continued health of the music, considered a unique art produced in the U.S.A.

It was Wein who founded the Storyville jazz club in Boston and in 1954 produced North America’s first summer jazz festival at Newport, Rhode Island. It spawned a folk festival there and scores of other jazz festivals across North America and around the world.

As a producer, Wein has been enormously successful. At one point, his Festival Productions Inc. ran 25 major international jazz festivals in the U.S., Europe and Japan. But in spite of his entrepreneurial success in promoting jazz, Wein has never stopped playing and finding good gigs for fellow musicians he loves and admires.

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Like many of her newly elected NDP Quebec colleagues, Morin has no experience in federal or provincial politics. She is not a newcomer, though, to political activity, having been active in student politics in Sherbrooke, where she is proud of her main achievement—getting the university to dedicate land on its sprawling campus so students and residents could plant vegetable gardens.

She also ran, unsuccessfully, for an ecological party at the municipal level.

It was these leadership qualities that attracted her to NDP recruiters, their eyes fixed on signing up young, energetic, idealistic candidates with some life experience. (There are more than enough lawyers packing the ranks of the old parties.)

“I love to work for people. In my life, I have always been involved in community,” Morin said.

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One day, Thérèse Lambert heard humanitarian Stephen Lewis speaking on the radio about his book Race Against Time, in which he describes his struggles amid the AIDS crisis in Africa, and his repeated encounters with grandmothers raising their AIDS-orphaned grandchildren.

From that point, she overcame her physical limitations to toil endlessly in support of African grandmothers, rallying others, complete strangers, to her cause, leading campaigns, sending food and materials overseas, giving speeches and going head to head with reticent politicians.

After becoming an active member of the Stephen Lewis Foundation Grandmothers to Grandmothers West Hill Group, she set up an independent charity in Malawi, a country in which the foundation had no foothold.

Raising funds with the help of her family, friends and fellow activist grandmothers, her support gradually spread from the village of Mnjale to 24 Malawian villages (and the number is still growing), so that the organization could no longer be called just Mnjale. It needed NGO status and a new name.

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