Meet our 2025 MusiCounts Teacher of the Year nominees — next up: Greg Chomut from Thunder Bay, ON.

The MusiCounts Teacher of the Year Award, presented by Anthem Entertainment, is happily celebrating its 20th anniversary recognizing and honouring exceptional Canadian music teachers each year.

Tune in to the 2025 JUNO Awards on Sunday, March 30 where the winner will be announced, and on our website & social media platforms @MusiCounts.

What is the music program like at your school?

I think that the music program at our school is a little different because it's a really small school. We normally have about 150 students from year to year, so it makes the music department smaller. I teach a “music for creating” class for grade 10 and 11, and it's all based around songwriting. It's been really cool over the years because, along with some of my colleagues, we have developed this music festival called Wake the Giant and that's put us in touch with tons of amazing musicians and Indigenous musicians that have come to the school and written songs with the students.

Then every year the music class from the previous year gets up on stage in front of thousands of people, and plays the song that they wrote with the artists that we've booked for the event. It's really cool bringing everything together at the end of the year, and a celebration of their music and their writing and everything.

The core part of the “music for creating” class is that writing music really helps you deal with different things that you're struggling with. I think for teenagers it's a really turbulent time. There's a lot of changes going on in your life. Love and heartbreak is more intense. For our students they're traveling away from home, so they're dealing with homesickness from their remote communities that are really small so there's the culture shock of coming to the big city, and that added layer on top of what teenagers are normally going through. And music can be a really healing experience.

For sure. And so how did the MusiCounts grant make an impact on this program?

What we used [the grant] for was to build a podcast studio, and through that we also have a partnership with the local CBC Thunder Bay and they come into my music class and coach the students on interviewing. So we've got a podcast that's on the CBC website, and we've got YouTube videos out there of our interviews. All the artists we book for Wake the Giant, we try to get interviews with them.

Some of the most notable ones have been X Ambassadors, which was an awesome interview that the students conducted over Zoom and they were such generous people with their time and it was such a captivating interview. We've interviewed DJ Shub and all these other great Canadian musicians, and it spilled over outside of music too. A big interview we did was Ryan Reynolds, which was really exciting for the school and everybody.

We're even using it now because it's benefited more than just music. We're currently recording Elders — we have a big Elders program here, connecting and getting Elders stories down because it’s such amazing experiences that they've lived through and these amazing histories. We're getting those stories recorded down in podcast form and it's literally happening right now while we're doing this interview, using the podcast studio that we purchased with the MusiCounts grant.

I hope the interview goes really well! So the next question is, what does it mean to you to be nominated for the 2025 MusiCounts Teacher of the Year Award?

Oh man, as a musician, it's a dream come true, right? The JUNOS is the biggest event and awards in Canadian music. Sometimes music teachers are often looked at as the fallback plan. If you want to get a career in music and it doesn't work out, go and teach some music. But for me, no way it was a fallback plan for me. I love teaching music and look, I'm going to the JUNOS anyways! So it's really cool for the whole school, it's really exciting.

I think it definitely gives me a little boost as a teacher, because obviously now the students all know that I'm going to the JUNOS and I think it makes my job easier for at least a little while. I'm just walking down the halls getting congratulated by everybody and it feels really good. I even got recognized at a Ski-doo parts store the other day, which kind of threw me off a bit but I guess they heard the story on one of the local news and my last name, Chomut, isn’t that common so when it popped up on the list, the guy recognized it.

That is so cool and congratulations again, too. So do you have a music teacher or mentor that has inspired you?

For my mentor, I settled on what I'm gonna say: Jason Colette. He's a big name in the Canadian music scene, and I can't even believe that I know him. But it was I think in 2018 or 2019, he reached out to me because I was a music teacher at this Indigenous school, and he was organizing a mentorship tour called New Constellations where Indigenous and non-Indigenous musicians were going across Canada and playing these really cool shows, also doing workshops with Indigenous youth and looking for people to mentor. There were so many cool musicians that came to the school and one of the songwriting workshops that happened was conducted by Peter and Leah from July Talk.

Just a side note: Jason Colette and July Talk were in my top five of Spotify Wrapped at the end of that year before this all happened! So my mind was blown. I have to really thank them because that song with July Talk, there were so many other musicians involved in that: Broken Social Scene, Anley Simpson, Nick Fario, tons of great First Nation-Canadian artists were involved and donating their time. I'm sitting back just thinking how lucky am I, just riding the wave.

That's what inspired the Wake the Giant music festival that we run here at the school, because we realized how supportive the music community is. I think that was right after Gord Downey passed away, and he inspired a lot of musicians to really focus on the relationship between First Nation people and Canada, right? So we knew that there was this desire to help and we thought we could give an outlet for that.

So, we started Wake the Giant and Jason helped us get it off the ground the first year, and he's come back every subsequent year since then. He’s always there as someone to ask questions throughout the year when we don't know what to do because he's a pro, he’s been in the music industry for a long time. He runs events in Toronto, has a wealth of knowledge and he's just always available to share that with us. Wake the Giant is the reason why I get to collaborate with all these amazing artists, connecting with our students for songwriting, so I really think without Jason and Peter and Leah — we would never be here.

That's so amazing. It's so cool to have people that inspire you end up being your friend. It's such a cool full circle moment. Your Spotify Wrapped ended up being the people that you meet, too.

It's unbelievable. A little funny anecdote [I remember] was talking to some of the band members from July Talk at the first Wake the Giant, because they're the ones who brought the students up on stage first, and one of my good friends knows how big of a fan [I am]. I try to keep that on the down low when I was hanging out with them, not be too much of a crazy fan, but I thought I had it hidden pretty good and one of my buddies brought it up, “How crazy is it Greg that you're hanging out with your favorite musicians of the world?” kind of thing and took down the charade.

What are you looking forward to doing at the 2025 JUNO Awards in Vancouver?

I'm really excited that I'm able to bring my whole family down. I have four kids and they range from 6 to 15, and we're getting to sit in the industry section. I mean that's exciting for me, but I imagine especially for my teenage children… Who knows who we're going to be sitting beside! This is an amazing opportunity that not most people don't get a chance to take part in. Then obviously we want to go to Vancouver and it's a beautiful place. I've been there once before and the city and the parks around there are so beautiful. Then the orange carpet — I mean, I think it's cool that it's an orange carpet. That's a really cool idea. Who gets a chance to go walk on the orange carpet? So I got to figure out what I'm going to wear, all that kind of stuff. It's really exciting. I can't even explain how excited I am. Yeah, maybe I can just go all orange… just blend right in.

Honestly, you could. That would be a very iconic outfit.

*Interview condensed for readability.