Sabrina: Why do you teach?
JP: It's about sharing. My passion for jazz is too great to keep it all to myself. I have to tell someone. I have to share jazz with the world. Don’t tell my boss, but I would teach for free. I feel it is my duty to share. I love it, I mean I love teaching and I love jazz.
Since there are so many different styles of jazz, from New Orleans to bebop and from East Coast to West Coast, my History of Jazz professor strongly believes that there is a kind of jazz out there for everyone to enjoy. In a small classroom, sitting 6-feet apart from me, Professor Jean-Pascal Vachon, or [Professor] JP as everyone calls him, springs to life as he remembers his hometown of Quebec City, a province of Canada where he was born in the 60s. 56-year old JP explains what it was like growing up in French-speaking baseball suburbia. Representing the minority of Canadians, French-speaking people in Canada developed their own culture with French, Belgian, American, and Canadian influences. As Quebec City is a middle-sized city, JP grew up in a tight-knit community, where he learned to navigate through three separate worlds: The Quebec, French, and American world. JP remembers feeling as though he could “pick his choice of fruit” when it came to deciding on what world he wanted to embrace.
