Vanessa Rodrigues serves up musical food activism. Photo by Tom Inoue.

When she isn’t playing jazz organ in Rio de Janeiro or running her own jam session during the Montreal International Jazz Festival, musician Vanessa Rodrigues can usually be found making her own pickles. The Montreal-based musician has her plate full with music projects, but high on her list of priorities is food—the growing of, the eating of, and the educating about. She recently released her album Soul Food for Thought, a dancey, funky album all about food and the politics surrounding it.

“I am not a hard-core activist,” she says. “Nor am I going to play the part of a preachy vegetarian. I support local, organic markets and am pro small business. I grow my own food whenever I can.”

With mostly instrumental tracks, including tunes like “What’s in This?” and “Eater’s Manifesto,” Soul Food for Thought gets listeners thinking about what they are eating. The song “Ode to Monsanto” might not have any lyrics, but the creepy, uncomfortable feeling Rodrigues gets from the agricultural biotech company is vividly conveyed. Accused of trying to take over the world’s food supply by patenting genetically modified seeds, and making farmers desperately dependent on their particular pesticide, the chemical firm is—with good reason—under constant scrutiny.

Rodrigues has done her homework on Monsanto and advises everyone to do the same. “People … need to know who Monsanto is, what it has done and what it is doing. These people made Agent Orange. You trust them with your food? Really?” Rodrigues recently started tending her own garden and now happily grows her own kale, beets, cucumbers, peppers, and carrots. But does she use pesticide?

“No thanks!” she says. “Sheep manure, that’s it.”

Len Dobbin, the most important audience member in Montreal's jazz scene. Illustration by Aislin.

In early fall of 1950, Len Dobbin stepped out of a listening booth on Rue Ste-Catherine in Montreal to find himself confronted by five New York jazz enthusiasts seeking potential founders for a satellite jazz appreciation society. Only 15 years old at the time, Dobbin had never met enough fans to think the project would succeed, but he agreed to give it a shot. As it turned out, there was enough interest in the city to sustain the club for almost a decade, but, more importantly for Montreal, the experience was enough to get Dobbin hooked indefinitely.

He spent the next six decades as a self-described “friend to jazz,” though his tireless enthusiasm as a journalist, photographer, promoter, researcher, and fan—almost entirely without pay—suggests an unusually demanding definition of friendship. His years post-retirement were dedicated to promoting young musicians, popularizing jazz in print and on the air, connecting musicians to one another, and bringing talent to the city. At 74, his stories and encyclopedic memory bordered on mythical: the man had photographed Miles Davis, gone clubbing with John Coltrane, earned a song dedication by baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams, and hosted some 1,500 radio shows.

When Dobbin died in July—after falling ill at his favourite Montreal jazz haunt during the world’s largest jazz festival—the city lost a great player in (surely not coincidentally) one of the healthiest jazz communities on the continent. But it is hard to tabulate Dobbin’s impact. It’s also hard to understand precisely his role: he was a trained accountant, a man who reportedly owned a jazz instrument for only a day in his life, but also, by all accounts, he was an integral part of the music scene.

Perhaps Dobbin’s passion offers us a model. As one of the first widely popularized improvisational art forms, jazz is often cited as a performance by all involved: without a score or conductor to follow, a piece relies on performers to generate its shape and depends on listeners to create its meaning, by becoming aware of the possibilities presented by each shifting cadence and making sense of how they are resolved. Never a musician, Dobbin was, perhaps, the ultimate listener: he heard potential in Montreal’s artists and denizens and did his best to realize its meaning.

Nova Scotia NDP Premier Darrell Dexter has a lot of reading to do, including This Magazine. Illustration by David Anderson.

The September-October 2009  issue of This Magazine should now be in subscribers’ mailboxes (subscribers always get the magazine early, and you can too), and will be for sale on your local newsstand coast-to-coast this week. All the articles in the issue will be made available online in the weeks ahead, though, so keep checking back for more. We suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and other tasty links.

On the cover of the September-October issue is Anthony Fenton‘s special investigation into the world of Canadian private security firms, armoured-car manufacturers and oil companies that are profiting from the chaos in Iraq. While Canadians are justly proud of the fact that we declined to join the misbegotten “coalition of the willing” that occupied Iraq in 2003, Fenton finds that in many ways — politically, economically, militarily — Canada’s involvement in Iraq today is deeper than ever. Three years after the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada, Paul Gallant surveys the terrain of LGBT activism and finds it increasingly deserted. Marriage certificates in hand, middle-class gays and lesbians have drifted away from the movement, he finds, while the underfunded and burnt-out activists left behind say there’s still plenty of work to do. And reporting from Israel, Grant Shilling meets the beach bums, peace activists, and former soldiers who believe that the region’s world-class surfing could be one way to bring Israelis and Palestinians together—if only he can deliver a load of wetsuits to Gaza.

There’s plenty more, including Paul McLaughlin‘s interview with new Nova Scotia NDP premier Darrell Dexter; Sienna Anstis profiles the remarkable long-distance relationship between the University of Manitoba’s microbiology lab and a sex-worker clinic in Nairobi, Kenya; Andrew Webster meets the  independent videogame designers who make Canada an increasingly important player in an emerging art form; Hicham Safieddine says that during the election uproar over the summer, Western mainstream media got it wrong about Iran—again; Soraya Roberts finds that, in choosing Veronica over Betty, freckle-faced comic-book icon Archie Andrews has subverted seven decades of cultural expectations; RM Vaughan tests the limits of his solidarity during Toronto’s great municipal strike of summer 2009 as the litterbox threatens his sanity; Laura Kusisto digs into the real numbers behind Saskatchewan’s plan to pay $20,000 to recent graduates who choose to settle there; Souvankham Thammavongsa sends a postcard about the strange nighttime happenings in Marfa, Texas; and Darryl Whetter asks why, when 80 percent of Canadians live in cities, so much of our fiction takes place down on the farm.

PLUS: Chris Jai Centeno on University of Toronto budget cuts; Emily Hunter on overfishing and the seafood industry; Jenn Hardy on the DivaCup; Milton Kiang on better ways to recycle e-waste; Navneet Alang on microblogging service Tumblr; Jason Anderson on the Toronto International Film Festival; Sarah Colgrove on Len Dobbin, the Montreal jazz scene’s most important audience member; Kelli Korducki reviews Who’s Your Daddy?: And other writings on queer parenting; and Graham F. Scott on net neutrality and the CRTC.

With new poetry by Sandra Ridley and Lillian Nećakov, and a new short story by Kathy Friedman.