Organ player brings old-school sound to Jets games

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This article was published 17/10/2016 (3478 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Meet the newest Winnipeg Jet player — organ player, that is.

Say hello to Trevor Olfert, the Jets’ new organist.

Song writer, orchestra founder and school music teacher, Olfert joins an august tradition that has linked hockey with organ music in Winnipeg for about a century.

About 25 National Hockey League teams have organists on staff. For Olfert, music and hockey are twin passions.

“As a kid I remember going to the Jets games and wanting to stay right till the end to hear the organ player,” Olfert stated online on the Jets website.

In an interview with the Free Press just before faceoff Monday, Olfert riffed a bit on those memories. “I can remember sticking around after the games to listen to the organist and then I’d go home and sit down at the piano and try to punch it out myself.”

Olfert said the organist always played the theme songs to the 1980s TV sitcoms Cheers and Hill Street Blues. Expect to hear them at Jets games again, he said.

To pay homage to that vintage link, True North Sports and Entertainment, which owns the Jets, installed an organ synthesizer in the upper bowl of the MTS Centre last month.

Olfert was a natural fit.

“Trevor, from the first time I met him, his passion came out very quickly, his excitement for the job, his willingness to do whatever he could to entertain the crowd here,” said Kyle Balharry, game production and broadcast senior director for True North.

Olfert talked passionately about what organ music means to hockey fans and mused on what kids in the arena might take away from the venerable tradition.

“Now that I’m doing this, maybe there might be someone, a 10-year-old kid or a 12-year-old kid who will pay more attention to the music,” Olfert said.

Olfert’s prowess will be on display when Wayne Gretzky and Teemu Selanne headline the alumni game between former Oilers and the Jet at Investors Group Field Saturday. Olfert is playing for the Heritage Classic game on Sunday, too, between the current Jets and Oilers.

For those events, expect him to focus on more traditional themes to mark the 2016 Tim Horton’s Heritage Classic.

A veteran of the province’s music scene, Olfert found himself playing in restaurants, churches, and other small events before he got into writing music for a 10-piece instrumental pop rock band. That was after he graduated with a general arts and education degree from the University of Winnipeg in 1996.

He has been teaching band music and physical education for the last 15 years at St. George School, part of the Louis Riel School Division.

Outside school, Olfert has turned his love of music into service for charity.

Twelve years ago, Olfert launched a 40-person orchestra, the Open Sky Orchestra.

Over the last five years, Olfert and his orchestra have raised more than $60,000 for the Children’s Cancer Fund at Health Science Centre and Myeloma Canada.

“Winnipeg is one greatest hockey towns on earth, quite frankly,” Balharry said while Olfert headed back to the upper bowl of the MTS Centre where the organ, technically six MIDI keyboards that produce thousands of sound effects, is installed.

“We really moved forward this year it being a heritage season and kicking it off with a bang, bringing the sounds of the organ to the MTS Centre and all of our fans, Balharry said.

“Organ sounds were the sounds of hockey arenas for the longest time. There was no canned music. It was all about the organ, back in the day, watching games and Hockey Night in Canada and of course back in the Winnipeg Arena,” Balharry said.

True North saved the old organ when Winnipeg Arena was demolished and it’s stored at the MTS Centre.

Out of date and sadly out of tune, the old gal has been called into service for old time hockey nights in the past and with the Manitoba Moose.

Its last public appearance was a couple of years ago for the NHL playoffs, set up in the former Cityplace next to the MTS Centre.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca