Wade Pfaff

Wade Pfaff, PhD candidate York U/ TMU, MA Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University, 2020. Wade Pfaff was a diverse artist and academic with a background in community work and immersive anthropological fieldwork in Black history and jazz in Nova Scotia and Ontario. A thirty-five-year veteran on guitar bass, and drums, Wade spent his youth as a disco, ballroom, and breakdance performer and instructor, and had recently joined A Black Peoples History of Canada project, a Heritage Canada-funded research group that will draft public school curriculums and learning materials on Canadian Black history to be implemented in schools across the nation over the next two years. In his recent PhD in Communications and Culture at York University and Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson) he collaborated with other groups, like the Digital Humanities Dept. at Brock University, on creating digital multimedia platforms to teach history. Wade continued to conduct ethnographic interviews for A Black Peoples History of Canada project, the Niagara Jazz Festival, and his own doctoral research on the migration of Black music forms throughout North America and countries around the Atlantic Ocean during the first half of the twentieth century. Wade, unfortunately, passed away on June 9th, 2023. He will be missed by all of us here at the TD Niagara Jazz Festival.