Brian McConnell plays flute, which puts him in a small club in Canadian jazz. He came to it late, at eighteen, but made up for lost time. By the time he played the festival in 2011 he had been at it for decades, and the trio he brought to Charlottetown fit the festival's afternoon and brunch slots perfectly.
How he got here
McConnell started out in a Toronto recording studio in the seventies. He was the janitor and coffee guy at first, then worked his way into mic setup and tape operation. The studio was called Thunder Sound, and one of the people recording there regularly was Doug Riley. McConnell has said that watching Riley and the room full of musicians he brought in, everyone from the Boss Brass, was what turned his head around. He became more interested in the players than the engineers, and more interested in the jazz they played in clubs at night than the jingle work during the day .
So he quit the studio and picked up the flute. He went to York University for a year, hung around the jazz program, and kept playing. He also worked in the musical instrument business for years to pay the bills, which is a very practical way to keep a jazz habit going. He has been recording his own music for a while now, a mix of flute, electronic wind instrument, and workstation arrangements. He calls it "jazz adjacent" rather than jazz, which is an honest way to describe music that borrows from the tradition without pretending to be something it is not .
At the festival
McConnell played twice on the closing weekend. Saturday afternoon at one he was on the outdoor stage on Victoria Row. Sunday at noon he moved to Globe World Flavours for the jazz brunch . Both were free or low-cost events, the kind of thing the festival did well back then. Put a trio in a room with good sightlines and let people wander in. No pressure, no ticket stub to worry about, just music with lunch or a walk down the street.
The brunch set on the Sunday was the last official event of the 2011 festival. A quiet way to close out a week that had started with late night blues at The Globe and ended with flute over eggs.
Since then
McConnell kept playing and eventually started releasing his own records. Short Sleeve Pants came out in 2020, Footman in 2022, and Dream Wheelies in 2023. All of them are on the streaming services if you want to hear where the flute took him .
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