Ottawa Jazz Hero
After nine years immersed in Canada’s theatrical community, back in 1996 Catherine O’Grady made a tight left turn into jazz administration — taking the reins of Ottawa’s then-16-year-old jazz festival. When she retired from the festival and a related children’s event in 2023 after 27 years at its helm, she had forged a reputation as a passionate music champion with a deep well of curiosity, which saw her embrace and showcase an exceptionally broad scope of improvised music and build a highly successful year-round presence on our national capital’s arts scene.
To begin her career, following her completion of a Master of Arts degree in arts management and cultural policy at City College in London, UK, O’Grady returned to her native Canada to become general manager of Vancouver’s Green Thumb Theatre for Young Children. In 1990, she took over a similar position at the city’s prestigious Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company. Moving east to Ottawa in 1992, she became head of the theatre section at the Canada Council for the Arts, her home for the next four years.
By the mid-‘90s, the Ottawa Jazz Festival was suffering through challenging times, and its board of directors selected Catherine to bring leadership stability to the organization. She also brought a genuine spirit of adventure, which translated into festival programming that managed to establish a successful balance between the festival’s risk-taking heritage and a broader, commercially minded view.
She’s often said that one of the secrets to her success was that she wasn’t a jazz fan; but she was the daughter of an avid one, and she remembered the kind of things that excited him in the music. Two marks of her tenure at the festival were her sense of adventure and the joy she took in sharing. She was as genuinely excited about exposing a few dozen fans to a relatively unknown artist as she was welcoming icons like Sonny Rollins and Dave Brubeck to the festival’s large, outdoor venue.
Beyond building audiences for creative music, O’Grady launched a successful annual children’s festival in Ottawa and, in 2010, joined the University of Ottawa’s faculty as a professor of audience development and marketing. Whe she retired from the Ottawa Jazz Festival she had successfully steered the event through challenges like construction disruptions to its traditional outdoor venue and Covid-19 lockdown, and re-established the festival as one of the city’s strongest cultural pillars. Ottawa jazz fans share the JJA’s celebration of Catherine O’Grady as a Jazz Hero.
— James Hale
DownBeat and SoundStageXperience.com
