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Peel District School Board was privileged to have Jowi Taylor and the Six String Nation Project its featured workshop for students at the Peel Regional Heritage Fair held on May 12, 2011 in Brampton.
Jowi Taylor is a multiple award winning writer and broadcaster best know for his long-running CBC Radio program, Global-Village, the Peabody Award winning radio series; The Wire: The impact of Electricity on Music, and its celebrated companion series, The Nerve: Music and the Human Experience.
In 2009, he left CBC and is now perhaps better or best known for his visionary project Six String Nation.
The Six String Nation guitar was Jowi's brain child born out of the 1995 Quebec Referendum. The story of the guitar - Voyageur - is the subject of his 2009 book for publisher Douglas & McIntyre entitled Six String Nation: 64 Pieces, Six Stings. 1 Canada. 1 Guitar. The project is also the subject of a unique 2009 commemorative collector coin in the shape of a guitar pick produced by the Royal Canadian Mint. To learn more about the Six String Nation project please visit
http://www.sixstringnation.com
Jowi agreed to facilitate a workshop four times over the course of the day - each time with a different small group of students.
During the sequence of four workshops, he developed collaboratively with the four groups of students, a title, chorus and verses of a song which is now called Your Voice. Subsequent to the Fair, Jowi teamed up with Algonquin College's Music Industry Arts program to produce and record the song. Mac Edwards, a student in the Music Industry Arts program, wrote the musical arrangement to the song lyrics and he was the first to play it on Voyageur, the guitar, on May 27, 2011. You can watch the studio performance at
http://www.youtube.com/user/AlgonquinVideos#p/u/6/ml_YbaK1kYE
Jowi's work at the Peel Regional Heritage Fair was referenced in a CBC segment which can be viewed at
http://youtu.be/u7NWllmxrck
and when Jowi travelled to Yellowknife in June for a CBC Radio interview, the host played Your Voice in its entirety as the lead-in to the interview - a first official CBC Radio play of the song.
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