George’s Roadhouse

We are approaching the end of George’s Roadhouse, at least as we have known it for many years. Sometimes known as George’s Fabulous Roadhouse, particularly when it was successfully being hyped for CBC 3’s national-recognition contest a few years ago, George’s has long been the happening place in Sackville, New Brunswick for music. It is slated to close for good, although I understand that there is a chance that it might still be available for musical events on a spot basis. This then seems an opportune time to reflect on my own favourite musical experiences at George’s.

George’s is right across the road from the once important and busy, but now little visited and completely unstaffed, train station in Sackville, New Brunswick.  (The station is now closed, although the train still stops here. Baggage handling is done by on-train personnel.) The building in which George’s is located, the remaining bottom floor of the Intercolonial Hotel, also known as the Sackville Hotel, was erected for A.W Dixon more than 100 years ago, to replace the earlier Intercolonial Railway Hotel, which had burned down as the result of a fire at the nearby Enterprise Foundry. The newer Intercolonial Hotel was still intact, although not occupied, when we moved to Sackville in 1978. Not long afterwards, the building was converted to what became known as Steve’s Tavern, and later George’s Roadhouse. Back in the day, we would sit on the front deck of Steve’s/George’s of a Friday summer afternoon, waiting for it to open, so that we might continue to debrief one another on the latest atrocities at Mount Allison and engage in often heated debate as to what one must do to set the world right, while we ate burgers and fries, or fish and chips, and consumed beer. While we waited for the doors to unlock, we were afforded a pleasant and somewhat becalming view of the area around the edges of the Tantramar Marsh, where it meets the Chignecto Basin. The old Sackville ship-building area is visible from the deck as well. Immediately behind and beside George’s can be seen the remnants of the Enterprise Foundry operation, which suffered another fire a few years ago.

Janet Crawford has clarified for me the details of the sequence of bars in this space. First was the men’s only Sackville Tavern. After being sold to Steven Boorne, it became known as Steve’s Tavern. Later it was bought by George Brown, and was renamed George’s Roadhouse. Subsequently, Mike Wheaton took over, and decided that the name George’s worked just fine. Mike’s brother Darren subsequently took over the operation of George’s, after Mike died. Darren also owns and operates Ducky’s, another bar in downtown Sackville. The name “Darren’s” wouldn’t have worked for the place, I suspect. By the same token, if I were ever to follow up on my joke that I would open up a jazz/blues/folk club in my dotage, I rather suspect “Berkeley’s Hideaway” would not wash either. (Speaking of Sackville establishments carrying the proprietor’s first name, a hole in the wall operation introduced within what was then Steve’s offered, for a time, Joey’s Pizza, before that nascent and ultimately highly successful local business moved out and into progressively larger and better appointed venues on both Bridge and York Streets.)

 As the photo below illustrates, George’s is somewhat unprepossessing in outside appearance. As for the inside, well it is pretty grungy too, but that is part of its charm.

I suggested to a friend that the combination of visiting band names appearing on the sign at the time this photo was taken might serve him well in his impending re-election campaign, but for some reason he thought better of it.

George’s, which has an official capacity of 225, has been the site of many a (Thursday) wing night, Friday night supper, and Sunday morning breakfast. There have also been long established and regular seasonal celebrations therein. Examples are the Mount Allison University Fine Arts students’ Hallowe’en costume parties, Boxing Day visits from the Ray Oliver Band, and Good Friday extravaganzas involving the oddly charismatic Sam Moon and his retinue. George’s exudes a casual and friendly atmosphere, albeit one with an underlying odour of wide-eyed young people on the make and somewhat sardonic old people on the bottle and who knows what else.

The dress code at George’s is that there is no dress code, or rather, the implicit folkway is that one should be attired casually.  An exception might be made if one were over-dressed with obviously ironic intent. I once went in there wearing a red Ottawa Hunt Club sports jacket that had belonged to my father. I had put it on for official duties in connection with an afternoon Christmas function of the Sackville Community Preschool Association, a no cost/low cost kindergarten provided in town before public kindergarten existed in the province. A Mount Allison colleague, already ensconced at his usual table at George’s, was heard to grumble that by my very propinquity to him in that ridiculous get-up I had destroyed his long-cultivated credibility with the locals.

There have been times when I have been somewhat concerned to witness obviously unwanted attentions being pressed at George’s, and have made subtle interventions, when I deemed it wise. I am not necessarily referring to alcohol-lubricated petitioning for sexual liberties to be taken, although that has certainly happened. One time, a colleague was being accosted by a somewhat inebriated student who evidently had just learned of the consequences he was slated to suffer as a result of some significant transgression on which the University Judicial Committee had ruled. My colleague sat on that committee, and the aggrieved student defendant did not seem to appreciate that by approaching her somewhat belligerently and under the influence, on what was after all “neutral territory” and during what were the dark hours of the night, he was crossing a line. My sidling over, saying not a word, was enough for him to calm down and back off. Believe me, this was not because I strike an imposing figure.  I think the presence of a third party made it more obvious to him that he was behaving inappropriately. It was reported to me that, later on that evening, the two individuals involved were able to have a reasonably friendly discussion. As you will have gathered from these two stories, George’s crowds are a mix of town and gown, student and faculty, and young and old.

As for the music at George’s, it has ranged from country music – the shit kickin’, the bluegrass, the honkey tonk, the new, and the alt- varieties – to undergraduate singer/songwriter guitarists of the folkish persuasion, to rock musicans, to alternative music practitioners, to singers of sea shanties, to blues players, to jazz artists, to slam poets, and it goes on and on.  George’s has done a good job of presenting both up and coming and established local and regional acts of various types over the years.

Since 2001, there have been as many as ten Tantramarsh Blues Society offerings a year in town, with perhaps 75 in all at George’s itself since 2001.  There have also been three Catbird Jazz Society presentations there.  (Catbird is a now relatively inactive TBS spinoff group.) As well, there have been fundraisers for many and varied worthy causes over the years.  Some couples have held wedding and anniversary dinners at George’s. We attended a 60^th birthday party there once, when a potluck house party was correctly estimated to be of sufficient general interest to warrant a change of venue. (More about that, later.) Interestingly, the Rotary Club has met at George’s for a number of years, at some ungodly early hour on Thursday mornings. Recently I learned that the Rotary Club had installed the ramp at the front of George’s, at least in part to serve the needs of one of its stalwarts, a retired faculty member who had had a major stroke. This ramp has since served to make it easier for quite a few people, including me, as I sought to get in and out for various events during the months immediately after I had had bilateral knee installation done. (I thought this ironic since as a critical sociologist by training I am a self-professed developer of what Peter L. Berger called “non-Rotarian insights”.)

There have been many great blues presentations at George’s, and they attract an interesting mix of town and gown, student, faculty and staff, locals and visitors, young and old, and Anglophones and Francophones. In the wintertime, when many of the blues events occur, some of us keep track of Saturday night hockey games during TBS events with our mobile devices, particularly in my case when Les Glorieux are participating in the playoffs, so that one of our interests does not preclude pursuing the other.  The organizers of the TBS presentations typically offer pot luck dinners to the performers, which also gives us the opportunity to chat with them about life on the road, other musicians, family, politics, and the like.  There have been some interesting experiments with food associated with the TBS events themselves, including a number of occasions on which there was barbecue brought into George’s. (The beans were particularly good.)

The most memorable blues concerts, for me, have been the ones by Guy Davis (six times, counting an upcoming one in April, and I am sure it will be memorable), Garrett Mason (six times as leader, at least twice as a sidesman), Hot Toddy (three or four times at George’s), Roomful of Blues (twice), Toni Lynn Washington (featuring Sax Gordon) (twice), Debbie Davies (twice), The Holmes Brothers, Duke Robillard, Harry Manx, Ray Bonneville, Harrison Kennedy, Ruthie Foster, Delta Moon, Charlie A’Court, E.C. Scott and Smoke, Sugar Ray (Norcia) and the Bluetones (featuring Monster Mike Welch), the Bob Margolin Band (featuring the impressively limber Nappy Brown), Tad Robinson with the Bruce Katz Band, the Nighthawks, and Fathead. Some of the other blues acts we have seen there include Anthony Gomes (twice), Mississippi Heat (twice), Dutch Mason, Big Bill Morganfield (for the non-cognoscenti, a son of Muddy Waters), Theresa Malenfant, Eddie Kirkland, Larry McRay, Joe Louis Walker, Kelly Joe Phelps, Johnny Rawls, the Larry Garner Band, the Lurrie Bell Band, the Jimmy Burns Band, the J-W Jones Band, the Grady Champion Band, the W.C. Clarke Blues Revue, John Primer, Michael Powers, Paul Reddick and the Sidemen, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Jack De Keyzer, Watermelon Slim, Isaac and Blewett, Slick Ballinger, Paul Rishell and Annie Raines, Sue Foley and Peter Karp, Moreland and Arbuckle, Li’l Brian and the Zydeco Travellers, Terry Gillespie (with Bill Stevenson, Tom Easley, and Jeff Arsenault), Joe Murphy, Shirley Jackson (without her Good Rockin’ Daddys),  Corey Harris and the 5×5 Band, Sugar Blue Band, and the Mellotones. There were also a few blues acts at George’s that we missed: Shakura Said, Preston Shannon, Bryan Lee and the Blues Power Band, the Andrew “Jr. Boy” Jones Band, the James Armstrong Band, and the Syl Johnson Band. Other artists, specifically John Cambelljohn, Dutch Robinson, the preternaturally talented Carlos del Junco, the rising Matt Anderson, the poignantly intense Charles Bradley with the Menahan Street Band, and Monkey Junk, those slick inducers of the shaking of Sackvillian booty, have all performed for TBS elsewhere in town, with the collaboration of the Town of Sackville, SappyFest, or Mount Allison University. On January 31^st, TBS welcomed Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas to George’s, and Nathan Williams was impressive, although I would have liked to have seen him stick to the zydeco. The intriguingly named Candye Kane and the great artist Guy Davis are to come later in the term.

Guy Davis, the most frequent of our George’s blues visitors, and for good reason, is the son of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, the latter the only person to speak at both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X’s funerals. Guy is from a show business family, then, and was I suspect raised in a heady atmosphere of the theatre, civil rights, social activism, and generally trying to do the right thing. He is also an actor, and, like his “Uncle” Pete (Seeger, that is) a great story-teller. Guy is for me the foremost living exponent of the Piedmont picking style of blues guitar, and he is also a great banjo picker, and an harmonica player reminiscent of Sonny Terry. Perhaps reflecting the interests of my youth, I am always happy when TBS brings in a practitioner of the folk blues. Most TBS regulars are looking for the Chicago and Texas styles, or rock-blues, because they want to boogy. Me, I’m a toe-tapper, finger snapper, and head-nodder, not a dancer. Once in a while, I go crazy and rap the table with my fingers. If I like what I hear, I buy at least one CD.

My favorite Guy Davis concert was actually somewhere other than at George’s, at an historical stone church in Paris, Ontario, where one evening he played a purely acoustic and candle-lit concert to about forty people, which is all the church would hold. It was candle-lit because there was no electricity in the building. I just happened to notice that he was playing nearby, when I was visiting my mother in Cambridge and thought to check out what was happening by scanning the local paper. The concert was absolutely magical, despite the presence of an uncomfortable number of mosquitos. This was some time after I had seen Guy once or twice already in Sackville.

The first time, I had come directly to George’s from the Brunton Auditorium on campus, where I had given an introductory talk on my father’s life and his vocal music and then listened to a number of student singers and pianists perform some of his music. I was pretty drained afterwards, but wanted to hear this blues artist that TBS impresario Roopen Majithia had told me I shouldn’t miss.  I perked up as soon as Guy started, and was an instant fan. The third time that he played at George’s, we had one our potlucks for him, at the home of one of the TBS organizers, who had actually gone to school with him for a while, in New Rochelle, New York. Linda and I had a chance to talk to Guy a bit about this and that. We even checked out his parents’ old home together with him using the just-recently-introduced Google Earth facility.

Here are two Guy Davis videos, which showcase his vocalizing, guitar-picking, story-telling, and harp blowing-propensities.

That’s No Way to Get Along

 

Railroad Story

 The first time that Guy performed at George’s, he included “Railroad Story,” which happened to coincide with the faint train-horn-blowing announcement of the approach of a Via Rail train, just across the road. I still haven’t figured out whether Guy timed the song’s placement in his set advisedly, having asked someone when the next train would be coming by, or whether it was just a happy coincidence.  In any case, it was quite a moment.

The first time I remember seeing Garrett Mason was when Theresa Malenfant appeared at George’s, backed by AJ and the Red Hots, to whom I gather she had just been introduced. Now, I have a prejudice against self-indulgent Janis Joplin imitators, which was the approach Ms Malenfant was seemingly taking that night, and it doesn’t help that I never liked Joplin herself that much. (Sacrilege, I know.) Anyway, between her perhaps put-on cranky stage demeanour, the band’s apparent laxity, and our being right up against one of the speakers, it was not a great night. However, the young guitarist – he looked about 16 – who was rumoured to be the son of Dutch Mason, was pretty good. Later that year, he, and the rest of AJ and the Red Hots backed up Dutchy himself. Mason the elder had kindly agreed to come at the last minute, because an American act had had difficulties getting up here for weather or van-breakdown reasons. (I think it was Big Jack Johnson.) Dutch was in a wheelchair for much of the evening, but his distinctive vocal delivery and his harmonica chops were still there, and quite a few local old-timers were really happy to see him again. Evidently Dutch ran a tight ship, because the band was considerably better than they had been the previous time. They had obviously played with him before, and he had them whipped into shape. Young Garrett was particularly impressive. As mentioned, has been back four times since, and it has been a great pleasure to witness his development as an artist.

Here’s Garrett playing with Keith Hallett.

 

Diddley Beat

 Roomful of Blues is one of the tightest bands I have ever seen. Here’s an example, involving a slightly stripped down version of the unit.

Boogie Woogie Country Girl/Two for the Price of One

 Debbie Davies has been on the road for more than thirty years, and has eleven solo albums out. Here’s just one video, a modified nod to Jimmy Smith, that gives an idea of how good she is.

Down at the Honky Shack

 Next,  a little taste of Sax Gordon and Toni Lynn Washington, both big favourites in town. The first time they came, Gordon wore a gold lamé shirt and tore up the place. Toni Lynn is a remarkable woman and a great performer. The second time they were here, I came to understand some of the harsh realities of life on the road, particularly in New England and Canada during Nor’easter season, when one has to drive for twelve hours or more to get to the next gig, plus suffer the indignities often experienced at the border. (One TBS performer, Li’l Dave Thompson, actually died in an auto accident in February, 2010, on the very last leg of a long road trip that had included Sackville, between Charleston, South Carolina and his home town, Greenville, Mississippi.)

The Delta Moon visit was one where I particularly enjoyed talking to the musicians, about other artists, different kinds of audiences, and, above all, political matters. Unfortunately, their performance at George’s was one of those occasions wherein, since we had poor seats, way at the back of the late-arriving-student and dancing section, and because I have for some years taken to using earplugs for auditory-preservation reasons, I could not hear either the music or the reactions of others as well as I would have wished. Somehow, though, I sensed that I should buy the CD, and it is one that I still enjoy listening to regularly. The members of Delta Moon enjoy touring in Canada, in part because we still listen to the music up here, so if you have a chance to catch them, I would recommend that you try.

Hellbound Train

I had never heard of The Holmes Brothers until Roopen told me they were coming to George’s for TBS in early 2008. I was completely blown away by that concert. It was, for me, the highlight of all of my experiences at George’s.  The Holmes Brothers personify roots music, combining r&b, soul, blues, funk, gospel, and country in an irresistible amalgam. I bought the 2007 State of Grace CD that night, and since then have acquired quite a few others.

Here are links to a couple of audio clips from State of Grace, “I Want You to Want Me” and the Nick Lowe classic, “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?”. I have also embedded three tremendous Holmes Brothers videos from YouTube. If you were to confine your video viewing to one, I would make it “Amazing Grace”.

I Want You to Want Me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPNhnIwT920

What’s So Funny http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csl-X6F7s0k

Feed My Soul (with Joan Osbourne)

Amazing Grace

You’re The Kind of Trouble

I wish I had taken the opportunity to talk to them while they were here, especially Wendell, the lead singer and guitarist. I would crawl over broken glass to have a chance to see them again.

Catbird Jazz Society presentations at George’s have included the Michel Donato Trio, featuring the remarkable Marin Nasturica (see my blog entry on “squeeze-box jazzers”), the Salsa Snow Fiesta, with Latin Groove (and a Caribbean Dinner), and Gypsophilia. These events were artistic successes, particularly the Michel Donato Trio one, but the financial results were decidedly mixed. (See blog entry on my various adventures as a presenter.)

The 60^th birthday party to which I alluded off the top involved an outstanding performance by Stephen Fearing, who has been to Sackville a few times, including several with Blackie and the Rodeo Kings. In this instance, Stephen performed alone, and through this event I finally realized how good he really is on guitar. (Since BARK involves Colin Linden, it tends to be primarily Stephen’s voice that one notices when they perform.) The following number displays both his vocal and instrumental prowess.

The Man Who Married Music

And there you have it. It will be a sad day when George’s closes its doors for good. But, as I said, there is still a chance that that day is not yet nigh.

Berkeley Fleming

Sackville, N.B.

Prince’s Trust

At some point in early 1987, our older son David entered a MuchMusic contest that, in return for his having submitted a hand-drawn facsimile of a Coke logo, offered the unlikely prospect of his being one of eleven winners of concert tickets, airfare, hotel accommodation, and spending money for two in connection with the upcoming Prince’s Trust concert at the Wembley Arena in London. MuchMusic and A&M Records were promoting the appearance of Bryan Adams at the concert through the contest and subsequent reportage on the event. Some weeks later, Linda called me at work to say that she had received a call from Toronto, had answered the skill-testing question correctly on David’s behalf, and had been informed that he was indeed the New Brunswick winner!

David was in Grade Eleven, and his final exams scheduled for the same time as the trip, so arrangements had to be made with the school to accommodate him. We also had to sort out who would accompany him to England: it had to be a parent or guardian, as he was still 16. I am chagrined to report that I suggested to Linda that I would likely get more out of the trip, or at least the concert, than she would. She agreed, thus confirming her virtuous nature, but with the understanding that she would go on the next such trip.  That offer remains open. I do feel badly about that. (So does she.)

It was quite a production getting our passports renewed, ultimately involving our driving down to Halifax in order to get them on time. Eventually that was all sorted out. David and I flew up to Toronto from Moncton on Day 1, first stopping in Saint John, and after six hours in Toronto we took a Wardair charter flight to Gatwick, near London. The plane was big, one of those 747s with a spiral staircase to the upper level, which we did not get around to visiting.  Our seats were near the staircase. The service and food were very good.

I don’t remember when it was that we gathered with the other winners, and received our various tickets, identity cards, and instructions. I vaguely recall meeting some people at the airport in Toronto, and others when we had gone through passport control at Gatwick on Day 2. The head of the Canadian “delegation” was, by the way, Denise Donlon, the MuchMusic “veejay” who was later, for three critical years, Executive Director of the CBC Radio English-language services, and widely and perhaps unfairly perceived to be the eminence grise behind the CBC’s change in its music policy. (Many of my friends still grumble about this, mostly about the shift to an “adult music” approach and the segregation of classical music into attenuated time periods on CBC Two, or rather CBC 2, as it had come to be called. I actually welcomed the widening of the types of music played, but I found the bizarrely eclectic nature of the morning and afternoon shows that emerged so off-putting that I was never tempted to listen to CBC 2 on a regular basis. I had not listened very much to the earlier CBC Two/CBC Stereo/CBC FM either, because the CBC was not available on FM in our area for quite a while, and by the time it was available to me my commute to and from work was only five minutes by car. Nor was I all that exercised over the reduction of news coverage on CBC 2:  I have listened to CBC AM/One/1 for news when I awaken and on the way home from work for my entire adult life, apart from when I was in the States, because I was seeking local as well as national and international news. Also, I should acknowledge, I heartily approved of the emergence of on-line streaming, particularly of the jazz and Canadian composers’ music, that the CBC introduced a few years ago.) Anyway, I found Ms Donlon a lively, enthusiastic, and congenial presence, and had the chance to chat with her a bit on the bus to the “after” party on the night of the Prince’s Trust concert.

A bus had been arranged to get us from Gatwick to downtown London.  We soon found ourselves at the Columbia Hotel, an establishment that had evidently seen its day. It was found in the generally prosperous Bayswater district in Wesminster, near Kensington Gardens, hard by Hyde Park, and not too far from the Marble Arch. (A quick Google search recently led to the realization that this was once considered the “rock ‘n’ roll hotel” in London, known for its tolerance of after-hours debauchery and other forms of excess by popular-musician guests. There was no sign of that while we were there.) We were intent on napping for a few hours immediately after getting into the room, and then just doing some kind of bus tour around the city to get a bit oriented and possibly to avoid some of the worst implications of jet lag. It was early in the day, so of course we couldn’t get into our hotel room for quite a while. We had a bite to eat while we waited. Once in the room, we did manage to drift off for a couple of hours. Although we hadn’t wanted to do anything too challenging on our first half-day, as we set off to begin a double-decker tour around central London, I managed to take an ill-advised and poorly timed step onto the street, not yet having adjusted to the left-side driving practices over there. I averted the oncoming vehicular disaster only by nimbly hopping back onto the sidewalk.  Those were the days, when nimble hopping was even possible to contemplate. After I had regained my equanimity, we proceeded cautiously over to the Speakers’ Corner area of Hyde Park. (We actually never ventured any further into the park during our brief time in London, so, as a result, we never even saw The Serpentine. Nor did we visit Kensington Gardens, which we should have done.) Unfortunately, when we arrived at the Speakers’ Corner, there was no one standing on a box remonstrating against either real or imagined ills. Nor was there anyone advocating any causes, be they worthy or questionable. Much to David’s relief, I am sure, I was not disposed to do any of those things myself.

The double-decker bus tour around central London was good for orienting us, but we were only drinking some of it in, given the dearth of sleep. Afterwards, we walked around and about in the area beyond the park for a while. Somehow we found our way over to the Old Bailey, and then grabbed some dinner at an enormous MacDonald’s, which had the most atrocious French fries I have ever eaten. This was rather disillusioning, given my general impression that MacDonald’s, for all its many faults, could at least be expected to proffer its questionable fare in a consistent and predictable manner. Apparently, the English had not yet figured out how to prepare the thin little fries, or perhaps they had corporate permission for a local variant that had not quite been worked out yet. Even David, who like others of his generation considered MacDonald’s fries the gold standard of potato consumption, didn’t like what we were provided at this particular establishment.  After supper, we wended our way back towards the hotel and went to bed not long afterwards, experiencing none of the insomnia that we had feared.

We were on our own for the first part of the next day, and had a number of tourist spots that we really wanted to visit on this our first trip to London. We started by taking a London cab to the British Museum, where we saw the Rosetta Stone, the Egyptian mummies, the Magna Carta, and the Elgin Marbles. We also had a pub lunch, at The Black Swan, which was nearby, and then took the underground back to the hotel. I regret that, while at the B.M., we did not visit the Reading Room, at that time still the main reading room of the British Library. This was a particularly lamentable omission on our part because the other time that I went to the Museum, with Linda on a conference trip in 2000, the room was still closed for the renovations that had begun in 1997, at which time its contents had been moved to the new British Library at St. Pancras. So, I never got to take a picture of Marx’s work station (otherwise known as Seat # 07), where he sat on a regular basis for so many hours, poring through Factory Inspectors’ Blue Books and reports of various commissions of inquiry into factory conditions, working hours, and child labour, while writing Das Kapital. The room was re-opened shortly after our time in London, so perhaps I can try visiting it again, in future. Here is a nice image of what we missed.

 

In the afternoon, we gathered together with the MuchMusic contingent at the hotel, and were taken out to the Wembley Arena/Stadium area, where we fended for ourselves for snacks for a couple of hours, following which there was a pre-concert private reception, at which the contest winners and their plus ones got to meet Bryan Adams. He was, yes, quite short, and quite friendly, in a brisk sort of way.  I shook his hand and, not wanting to impede David’s access to him unduly, said something awkward like, “I’m not the contest winner”, at which point he rejoined with something along the lines of, “Well, alright then, I better say hello to him”, and moved immediately to do so. David was thrilled. He reported later that he managed to get two autographs and a photograph from Bryan, gave him a New Brunswick pin, and, together with three of the other contest winners, did some taping of an advertisement for the “Power Hour” on MuchMusic. He also eventually got autographs from both Denise Donlon and the cameraman, Dave Russell.

Before the concert began, Prince Charles and Princess Diana came in and sat down. We had better seats, really. Theirs were doubtless more secure, however. (The next day, David found a scandal sheet that claimed breathlessly that the two royal eminences, she reportedly braless, and he probably as well, had been candidates for assassination that evening.) The prince and princess were joined by Boy George, who was not performing that night, at least not on stage.

Of course, I was primed to have a good time when I saw the house band come on at the beginning of the concert. Lead guitar was one Eric Clapton. The bass player was Mark King, and Mike Lindup was on keyboards: I was advised that both of them were from the group Level 42, of which I knew nothing at the time. The drummers were Mark Brzezicki (from Big Country) and Phil Collins, along with the lanky, be-shaded Ray Cooper, seemingly perpetually and always cheerfully on tambourine. There were various brass and reed players and three back-up singers, with whose identity I was not familiar, but they all did a fine job. Occasionally, others joined the house band, and I provide some examples below.

The Level 42 boys took the lead at the beginning, and I was favourably impressed by Mark King, who was a commanding presence on stage. He sang, played, and, much of the time, gleefully prowled about. Eric Clapton did a fine solo on the performance of Level 42’s big hit, “Running in the Family”.  Looking at it on YouTube, one is struck by how very 1980s it is, but it did remind me how of how much fun it was to watch Mark King in action, and what a thrill it was to see Clapton live.

The Bryan Adams appearance was definitely a highlight as well, for the crowd generally and for the Canadian contingent in particular.  We were ten or fifteen rows from the front of the stage, and just to the left of being smack in the middle. Some of the contest winners waved a couple of Canadian flags while Bryan was singing. I was quite amazed at how popular he evidently was in England at that time. This became obvious as soon as his arrival on stage was announced, and he was certainly a most dynamic and well received performer. I gather he had been at the concert the year before, in the company of Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Tina Turner, etc.. This time, he performed “Heart’s on Fire” and “Run to You”, both to thunderous applause, and concluded with a fantastic rendition of Dion’s “The Wanderer”, with lead vocals by Dave Edmunds. Here is the latter performance, although this could well be the version performed at the second concert, held the following night.

Bryan hung around afterwards, participating in Elton John’s first number and in Ringo Starr’s late-concert vocal intervention, about which I comment below.

Some years earlier, I had had explained to me by one of my Mount A thesis students how popular Bryan Adams was among his generational cohort. In the 1980s, the only Canadian pop music that I followed, somewhat involuntarily, involved Doug and the Slugs, Martha and the Muffins, The Box, Men Without Hats, Northern Pikes, The Tragically Hip, and Grapes of Wrath, all of whom received heavy play on MuchMusic and on whatever radio stations our kids listened to back then. I particularly enjoyed The Tragically Hip and Northern Pikes. I also found my own way to the roots stuff to which I have always been drawn, and listened regularly to Downchild Blues Band, Blue Rodeo, Cowboy Junkies, Sylvia Tyson, Gordon Lightfoot, Murray McLauchlan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, The Band (in its post-Robertson incarnation), the McGarrigle Sisters, Kashtin, Bim, Bruce Cockburn, Colin James, Jeff Healey, and two performers that I had encountered first at the Festival of Friends in Hamilton in the 1970’s, David Wilcox and Joe Hall and the Continental Drift. I also listened then to three Atlantic Canadian groups, The Barra MacNeils (good Allisonians), the Rankin Family, and Great Big Sea (whom we heard for the first time in the dining hall at Mount Allison). I was of course vaguely aware of the Bryan Adams phenomenon, but did not appreciate the extent of his appeal for denizens of postsecondary institutions until put in the know by my student.  I enjoyed our wide-ranging conversations. Then a part-time disk jockey and radio news reader, and for quite a few years now a high profile CBC television news reader and correspondent based on the West Coast, he also provided me some insight into the popularity of The Clash among North American young people, and even hipped me to the somewhat puzzling appeal of Eddy Murphy, Saturday Night Live no longer claiming my direct attention as it once had.

Meanwhile, back in London, Alison Moyet (from Yaz) (“Invisible”, “Try a Little Tenderness”) really slayed me with her rendition of her second number. I had not heard of her before this concert, and she had a good contralto voice. This is the performance to which I alluded in my earlier (September 17, 2013) blog entry on “Sad Songs”, all 46 of them!  As I reported there:

 In its original incarnation, this song was performed in the 1930s by the likes of Ruth Etting and Bing Crosby.  When she was still under the wing of John Hammond, Aretha Franklin recorded it in the early 1960s, which led Sam Cooke to perform it live, in an attenuated, two-verse version. Otis Redding’s soul/R&B version, backed by Booker T. and the M.G.s, struck like a bombshell. I also heard a singer until then unknown to me named Alison Moyet perform it beautifully at the 1987 Prince’s Trust concert in Wembley Arena in London, England, tickets for which my son David had won through MuchMusic. I embarrassed myself by waxing enthusiastic about this being a great Otis Redding song, at which point I was corrected by our MuchMusic host, Denise Donlon, who said “You mean Sam Cooke!” Hah! Wikipedia clearly establishes that we were both wrong.

Alison Moyet’s performance of her hit, “Invisible” is discussed on the web and reproduced on YouTube, but, unfortunately, what she did with “Try a Little Tenderness” that evening is not available.  If you were interested in hearing a somewhat more muted version, and one in which she sings consistently below the note for much of the time, malheureusement, search for Moyet, Try a Little Tenderness, and/or Letterman on YouTube for her performance of the same number just two months later. You’ll see what I mean about the voice, anyway.

Elton John, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison were among the previously unannounced “surprise guests” who had ostensibly just dropped by. Elton John, not long after having had non-cancerous polyps removed from his vocal cords, came on stage to provide a rousing rendition of “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” (with Bryan Adams). Check out Eric Clapton’s opening salvo in this number, which begins with a nod to T-Bone and Chuck.

Elton John also performed his early 1970s number, “Your Song”.

As I mentioned, we attended the first of two 1987 Prince’s Trust concerts. The second was the following evening. There had been rumours that Paul was going to be there, as had been the case the previous year, but, alas, we did not see him. However, George and Ringo were reunited there that night.  George performed “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (with Eric Clapton, as in the original recording) and “Here Comes the Sun”, both numbers with Elton John and Jools Holland (formerly of Squeeze) on keyboards, Jeff Lynne on guitar, and Ringo Starr, Phil Collins, and Ray Cooper on percussion. Phil Collins is no Ginger Baker. Neither is Ringo, but I like him just the way he is.

Here’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. Yes, Elton John really says “By Jove!” in the introduction.

As for Ringo, at the end of the concert he did “With a Little Help from My Friends”, with more than a little help from his friends, that is to say with pretty well everybody who had been up on stage earlier.

Eric Clapton himself performed “Behind the Mask”, as well as “Wonderful Tonight”. The latter was a particularly beautiful performance of a song inspired by Patti Boyd, ex-wife of George Harrison and at that point still married to Eric himself, although their relationship was to cease officially the next year.

Boy George was introduced at one point, but did not sing. Others who did perform during the evening were Ben E. King (“Stand by Me”) (not quite as thrilling as seeing him do it in the Esquire Show Bar in Montréal about a quarter of a century earlier); Paul Young and Phil Collins (“Reach Out”/”I’ll Be There”/”I Can’t Help Myself”/”It’s The Same Old Song” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin”, the latter not as cringe-worthy as one might expect); Go West (“Don’t Look Down”); Labi Siffre (“So Strong”); Tony Hedley and Gary Kemp (of Spandau Ballet) (“Through the Barricades”); Buddy Curtess and the Grasshoppers (“God Save the Queen”); the new it group, Curiosity Killed the Cat (“Misfit”); and the oddly-costumed Midge Ure (“If I Was”), who also served as the musical director for the entire concert.

Instead of having post-concert backstage access, as originally advertised, we were provided entrance to the grand re-opening of a newly refurbished and rather posh if glitzy nightclub called Le Palais. On the bus that we took over there, wherever there was exactly, it was suggested to me by someone who shall remain nameless that the two underage contest winners were going to have to be whisked quickly by the door people to ensure that they were allowed in. Mission accomplished, without significant heart palpitations arising.  It turned out that this was some kind of complex cross-promotional event, also tied to the release of a new single by George Michael (late of Wham), with the provocative title, “I Want Your Sex”. Doubtless you remember it. The scene at the club was quite surreal. Everywhere one looked there were multiple and gigantic TV screens with the disconcertingly Big-Brother-like image of Mr. Michael doing his thing, in which I was not at all interested. We managed to find some good drinks, and we left David and his younger new friends to their own devices, although keeping a surreptitious but watchful eye on them, of course. Apparently, David ran into Bryan Adams at the club, and Bryan obviously remembered having met him earlier, which of course delighted him no end. David also recalls that Charles and Diana were there.  We left the place just after 3:00 a.m. and got back to the hotel around 3:30. It had been quite a day.

We were again on our own for Day 4. We had breakfast at the hotel, and then walked over to Oxford Street, known for its shopping opportunities. There was an impressive record and CD section in the Virgin Megastore there, but the prices were absolutely appalling. As a result, I was, uncharacteristically, not in the least tempted to buy anything. I had come to realize that what cost a dollar at home would require a pound over there, which prepared me for the realities of London prices when next I visited the city a few years later, with Linda. David and I then toured St. Paul’s Cathedral, and inspected Wellington and Nelson’s tombs in the crypt.  We had a quick lunch, and visited the Tower of London, our tour guide being a droll Welshman with a most mellifluous voice. We later visited Westminster Abbey as well, and saw the sculpture of Boedicia (with whom I was fascinated as a child), Big Ben, the Tower Bridge, and Fleet Street. We took quite a few underground trips that day. At one point during our time in London, we ran into some kind of Tamil demonstration, the Tamil diaspora having begun some four years earlier. We decided not to hang around, just in case. We also did some exploring in the area around the hotel and had Chinese food for supper on Queensway, a major thoroughfare nearby, where we also discovered, of all things, an indoor ice-skating rink!  It was on Queensway that David purchased the aforementioned scandal sheet with rumours of royal assassinations averted. We repaired to the hotel not long after supper, as poor David had three hours’ worth of physics studying scheduled for the flights back (LGW-YYZ-YSJ-YQM) and we had to get up pretty early in the morning, to set off for the airport. (That it was physics he had to study is not without significance, as David ended up becoming a medical physicist, after an earlier dalliance with astrophysics.)

On Day 5, we started off with a bus trip to Gatwick, at which we said our farewells and started shopping. We bought Linda and young Michael these new-ish things called “Swatches” in Duty Free. I might have purchased a single malt of some sort. David is still kicking himself for not having asked deadpan comic Steven Wright for an autograph when he passed right by. Apparently he had seen him at the concert as well.

The highlight of the trip back, which involved a fair bit of napping, was breakfast with scones, Devon cream, and jam. I miss Wardair.

Berkeley Fleming

Sackville, N.B.

NFB Memories

In many ways, I am a child of the National Film Board.  At first, the NFB was all about the music for me, which only made sense, since my father was a staff composer there from the year I was born, 1946, to 1970. I suspect that the prospect of my arrival led Dad to seek regular employment earlier than he might have done as a budding young composer still studying in Toronto. The NFB was originally established in Ottawa some seven years before he started working there. He ended up writing the music for well over 200 films, and as Music Director (from 1958 on) was also responsible for much of the recording and editing of other film scores. That was of course just his day job, as he also wrote several hundred other works, and was an organist and choirmaster, as well.

If the NFB was initially about music for me, it also, eventually, came to be about social analysis, history, politics, French-English relations, and social inequality, all significant motifs in my life as an adult.

I was the stereotypical introverted and conformist first-born child in a young family involving four children who all arrived on the scene within a five-year period.  (Our poor mother.) I was also a smart kid, or so I was led to believe. I loved music, and was highly conscious, and perhaps inordinately proud, of what my father did for a living. Much of it he did at home, and after hours. One of my strongest childhood memories relates to Dad’s practice, when trying to meet some NFB or commissioned-work deadline, of composing through the night, while the rest of us were trying to sleep. I found it all strangely comforting. Memories of the sound of his piano, the starting and the stopping, the hesitation, the repetition, the pauses while I imagined he was writing, using a government-issued pencil on manuscript paper purchased at Archambault Musique, the ill-disguised frustration, and the occasional triumphant exclamation, remain vivid even today. (NFB pencils had this cautionary slogan on them: “Misuse is abuse”.  Evidently one was not supposed to steal the pencils, or presumably take the letterhead or manuscript paper home. A Marxist with a sense of humour (and I do not mean a Marxist, tendance Grouchiste) might have referred to this as “separation from the means of composition”. In any case, since it was understood that much, probably most, of the NFB writing was done at home, there was no danger of the place being raided by the civil-service pencil police.)

As I have suggested, awareness of the process of music composition, whether for the Board or on commission, was a part of my daily round of existence. Even when Dad was on the road he would call to bring Mom and any child who happened to be around at the time up to speed on the latest developments. One time, when he was calling from England with a progress report I was put on the line, and I told him some fanciful tale about something that had supposedly happened at school, at the end of which I exclaimed, “April Fools!”, at which point he solemnly informed me that April Fool’s panks could only legitimately be pulled before 1:00 p.m., and here it was well past 2:00, Ottawa time.  I have to admit, he almost convinced me.

What was really special, though, was when Dad took me to work, which he did on occasion, because for me his work environment was truly a place of wonder. I might only have gone to the NFB building in Ottawa once. I certainly went at least the one time, because I have quite clear memories of the staircase that we had to climb to get to his office. It was one of those metal-grate affairs. In its Ottawa years, or at least the ones when we were around, the NFB was in a very old building, on Sussex Drive and by the confluence of the Rideau and Ottawa Rivers, roughly across the street from where, in 1958, that is two years after the NFB had been moved to St. Laurent, Québec, the new Ottawa City Hall building was erected. (That was so long ago that that building is today usually called the old City Hall, although in 2011 it was officially renamed the John G. Diefenbaker Building.) The NFB building itself was demolished shortly after we departed Ottawa, and the grounds were left as a park, with a suitable historical marker indicating what had once stood there. I would have been no older than ten when I visited the NFB on the one occasion that I somewhat dimly recall. I found some old photos among my father’s papers recently that suggest that, initially, the NFB must have been housed elsewhere, or perhaps there was an additional, satellite location. Indeed, I have found some identical and some similar images in a small NFB photo archive on the web which identify the location as 25 John Street, which is fairly near the location that I remember visiting. I shall have to check one of the institutional histories available in book form to clarify this.

I had occasion recently to read an account of the life and work of Louis Applebaum, who brought Dad to join the Music Department at the NFB. In it, the author, Walter Pitman, referred to “the old barn on Sussex Avenue”, and explained that the film-makers had had to share space therein with some kind of laboratory, which entailed having to suffer the “stink of guinea pigs”.  He also recounted that there was no piano available in the building, and that, as a result, Applebaum had had to use the nearby French Embassy’s instrument. He didn’t really mind, apparently, since, by his testimony, he spent more time in the “cutting room” than at the keyboard, in any case.

Apparently there were NFB Christmas parties for employees and their children. I rather doubt they were held at the “old barn” itself, but possibly they were. Here is a 1951 photo of some of us, suitably dressed up, on one such occasion. The three Fleming boys, short pants and all, are arranged in the front row. (Sister Margot was either a newborn or her arrival was imminent. In any case, she was absent.) Michael and I would appear to have matching bow ties. According to a just-discovered note on the back of the photo we were watching a puppet show of “Little Red Riding Hood”, and the camera caught us just as the wolf was chowing down on Grandma. The person on the viewer’s far left might well be Anthony Hyde, one of two sons of NFB director Laurence Hyde. (Hyde the elder directed about twenty NFB films, including the 1967 Tuktu series, for which Dad composed the music. I came to know his writer sons, Anthony and Christopher, better, if briefly, later in life, through a mutual friend.)

In the early years, the NFB adopted the practice of sending out travelling projectionists, to show their films in various neighbourhoods and communities. Here is a photo of one such occasion, in an unknown location, from the NFB archives.

 

Often, Board films were presented to us in classrooms and school assemblies, not only in Ottawa, but also in Pointe Claire and Ste. Anne de Bellevue, where they were screened for our entertainment and edification, preferably both. I was always thrilled when the credits included reference to Dad, and was very pleased with myself when I had already figured that out beforehand. There are certain NFB films from the elementary-school days in Ottawa that I remember particularly fondly, regardless of whether the music was by Fleming or not.  My absolute childhood favourites, both seen many, many times, were “The Romance of Transportation in Canada ”(1952) and “The Story of Peter and the Potter” (1953). Although both are available on-line, as are a third and fourth video alluded to later, the NFB embedding facility seems not to be working, so the best that I can do is to provide the URLs.

http://www.nfb.ca/film/story_of_peter_and_potter

“Peter and the Potter”, as we always called it, remains, to this somewhat jaded sexagenarian eye, a perfectly charming film. I suspect that it resonated with me in childhood because it had to do with a boy about my age, seeking to establish his independence, and encountering a new and fascinating world of nature and craftsmanship while coping with certain challenging circumstances. An accident had led to the need to replace a broken item just purchased, and happenstance led to his meeting the challenge by commissioning the crafting of a present “made especially for your mother” by a family whom he had met through a chance encounter in the woods. Until viewing it again the other day, I had completely forgotten that folk singer Alan Mills was the narrator. Of course, Robert Fleming was the composer of the (largely pastoral) music. Don Wellington, about whom I shall say more later, was the sound editor. I probably saw this film at least five times while in school, and even remember one time watching it with our two children after we had moved to Sackville.

The other favourite, with its cool, jazz-influenced, music by Eldon Rathburn, was the highly amusing and informative animated film, “The Romance of Transportation in Canada”, which apparently was nominated for an Academy Award in 1953. (The NFB has had more than 70 such nominations, more than 50 of them in one or another of the various short-film categories, and has won a dozen or so Oscars over the years.) The narration for this film is said on the NFB site to have been provided by Max Ferguson, but I am fairly confident that the film credits themselves correctly identify the narrator as NFB film director Guy Glover. The sound is by Kenneth Heeley-Ray.

http://www.nfb.ca/film/romance_of_transportation_canada/

I was even implicated in the production of an NFB film, once.  Perhaps, technically, this should be referred to as “post-production” involvement. When I was ten or eleven, that is in 1957, I was persuaded to participate in the dubbing of my voice over that of the original actor in an episode of one of those  “values education” sorts of endeavours that the Board was periodically prevailed upon to produce for school use. The film was called “Being Different”, and was about ten minutes in length. The story, as I recall it, was of a young lad, ultimately voiced by myself, who had made friends with a new boy in school. Upon visiting the latter’s home, somewhere in suburbia, our protagonist encountered the boy’s father, who had the odd hobby – or perhaps it was the profession – of studying and collecting butterflies. The lad took this up as a joint activity with his new friend. At some point, he became aware that their friendship and his nascent interest in entomology were setting him apart from his original circle of chums, and at one critical point he had to choose between attending a longstanding acquaintance’s just-announced birthday party and going off on an already-scheduled butterfly expedition with the new boy. At that point, the story stopped, and certain dramatic words were intoned: something along the lines of the question “What would you do?” This was presumably when the teacher was to stop the film, encourage class discussion, and draw conclusions, more likely to be moralistic than relativistic, given the times. Mercifully, this particular film is not available on-line, but I imagine that its classroom showing might have been resumed after discussion, to see what “actually” happened. I have it in my mind that that is what was done, and that it turned out that the lad succumbed to peer pressure and reneged on his commitment to his new friend, going instead to the birthday party, but then felt tremendous guilt and shame over the decision. Perhaps I am projecting, in the Freudian rather than the cinematic sense .

I don’t know why the original actor’s voice was found wanting, and I was never under any illusion that I now had an acting career before me. (I was much too introverted, and already had a fear of forgetting the words to songs that I had to perform.) I think that the Board must have been desperate to get some young voice, any boy’s voice really, on that sound track, and pronto! I wonder why they didn’t prevail upon the producer’s son, whom I came to know some years later later and who was about my age. (Both the producer and the son were named Nicholas Balla. The latter is a law professor at Queen’s, specializing in family and child law.)  I vaguely recall that Malca Gillson, like my father originally from Saskatchewan, and a producer and director at the Film Board, encouraged me during the process, although as far as I can see she had no formal role in the production of the film. Her husband, Denis, also worked as a photographer and cameraman at the NFB. (Her uncle was, by the way, Bora Laskin, eventually the Chief Justice of Canada.) The Gillsons happened to live across the street in Baie d’Urfé from the young woman whom some of you will know as my saintly wife. Resuming the narrative, and with apologies for the perhaps unnecessary digression, I will note that, although Mrs. Gillson was rather more extroverted than most, she was very kind to me on this occasion, and needed to be as I was fairly nervous. I was paid $10 for the voice work, which took maybe two hours, and I remember being irritated when the cheque arrived, with about $1.60 in taxes deducted. Now, of course, I am pleased, indeed eager, to pay my taxes. I insist on it, actually.

In the 1970s, I told a friend and colleague this story about my voice work, and noted that the film in question was still listed in the NFB catalogue. Faculty members in the social sciences at McMaster in those days often arranged to borrow NFB films for pedagogical purposes, and we decided that it would be a hoot to include reference to this one when one of us next ordered films for a sociology course. This did happen, and it was very odd hearing my pre-adolescent voice on the sound track. The film itself was pretty much as I remembered it.  Of course, by then a professional sociologist, and already teaching courses in which the concept of socialization was paramount, I found its content and its evident exhortative purpose interesting from an analytical point of view.  I no doubt raised this serious matter for discussion with my colleague, lest too much attention be paid by him to the possibly risible nature of my vocalization.

I went into work with Dad a few times while in elementary and high school, presumably on whatever they called professional development days in Québec at the time.  He would often drive in from Pointe Claire with a neighbor, Normand (“Norm”) Bigras, who worked as a general assistant in the Music Department, his duties including contracting musicians, editing sound, and occasionally composing music. Getting to St. Laurent from Ste. Anne de Bellevue during rush hour was often problematic, and Côte de Liesse Boulevard was typically quite congested, much to Dad’s frustration, but at least we had the radio, which meant the CBC, to keep us amused, and of course informed.

I was particularly fascinated by a couple of recording sessions that I attended at the NFB. One involved as large an orchestra as the NFB could afford to hire, possibly for the Canada at War series, which was a truly massive undertaking in the late 1950s and early 1960s, masterminded by the redoubtable Donald Brittain, who wrote the script and co-produced the thirteen half-hour programs, aired on the CBC in 1962. By this time, much of the NFB production was of films intended for television broadcast, although of course films were also sent to various outposts scattered across the country for showings, particularly in schools, and to Canadian embassies around the world, as well. This particular series, now available with related bonus material on DVD, involved an incredible amount of original music, the production of which was co-ordinated by my father, although all four staff composers at the time contributed to the writing. I either recognized or had pointed out to me at the recording session I attended various musicians from the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, including several Massellas, a couple of Joachims, and one Brott.

 The other session I remember actually involved the integration of sound effects with the already-recorded (jazz) score, narration, and dialogue for “The Great Toy Robbery” (1963), an hilarious NFB animated film, the graphics of which were running on a screen while the sound effects were being created and recorded in the session for which I was present. The music had already been recorded by then. It was a Mancini-esque jazz score by Donald Douglas, whom everyone called Soapy, and whom I thought to be fascinating. He seemed funny and ultra-relaxed. The sound effects creator was Don Wellington, whom I was aware had originally been a French horn player, and whose acquaintance with Dad went a long way back, I think to Toronto Conservatory of Music days. The Wellingtons actually lived on Île Perrot, just across the bridge from my then hometown of Ste. Anne de Bellevue, and we visited the Wellington home at least once. Their son Frank went to school with us. Many years later, I realized that the multi-volume Groves Dictionary of Music (1904 edition!) that my father had in his office (and I now have in the upstairs “music library” of the Silver Lake estate) had actually belonged to Don Wellington when he had been a music student, and that the marginal notes within those volumes were his, not Dad’s. Anyway, this was an example of a film for which my father received no mention in the credits, yet he was directly involved in the production of the sound track, in his capacity as Music Director.

http://www.nfb.ca/film/the_great_toy_robbery/

I was also intrigued by the craft practice of the various people in the Music Department, and especially the editing process that Dad and Norm Bigras showed me a couple of times. I have since read a short article by my father on “Music for Films” (1961), and I certainly recognized much of what was being discussed in it. On the craft aspects of what was done there, he discussed the creation of an initial and detailed “shot list”, from which musical sketches were developed, typically at the piano, and later turned into orchestrations, all the while guided by consultation with and feedback from the producer and the director. The orchestration was then broken down into individual parts, which had to be copied, in preparation for the recording process. The latter was itself discussed in the article, and it brought back memories for me. Dad would conduct from the score, of course, but also used a “cue sheet” and a stop watch, having rehearsed the timing of the score against the film. He also kept an eye on the film being projected behind the heads of the musicians assembled for the recording session, who themselves had very little rehearsal time. There was also reference in the article to various æsthetic considerations, the need to bear in mind the nature of the intended audience, the imperative to serve the artistic and didactic intentions of the director, the pressure to assuage the cost concerns of the producer, and all without overly compromising the music. Adjustments were of course made on the fly, as well. Once the recording session was finished, the track was taken to the editing or “cutting” room, which involved the use of a Moviola machine, a pair of scissors, and a tape-splicer. There then followed the “marrying” of all of the sound elements of the film – the music track, the sound effects, the commentary, and the dialogue – “into one homologous whole”, which had then to be fit by the re-recording specialist (sometimes called the sound engineer or “mixer”) into “their proper place and in correct proportion to the demands of the film”, this sometimes involving as many as 18 sound tracks running simultaneously. I gather that Dad and his colleagues were accomplishing minor editing miracles within constraints of time and money, and invented a number of procedures and make-dos that they and others in the film business continued to use for many years thereafter.

I have a crummy 1950s snapshot of Vincent Massey with Dad, examining a Moviola, but I cannot find it at the moment.  Luckily, I have been able to scan a so-so print of a professional (NFB) photo likely taken on the same occasion, which can be seen below. Massey’s visit to the Film Board was not a matter of idle curiosity or of merely fulfilling his official duties as Governor-General. My father had actually known Massey since his student days in London, England between 1937 and 1939, when Massey was Canadian High Commissioner there. This was at the very time (1938) that Massey and his secretary, Ross McLean, were advocating the establishment of what became the National Film Board of Canada and recommending the recruitment of John Grierson to serve as its first Commissioner. This was done in 1939.

 Copying of scores was of course done by hand in those days, and it still fascinates me to discover and pore over examples of my father’s autograph scores, both the initial sketches and the final products. Without a doubt the latter evince a “beautiful hand”, as he might have put it when discussing someone else’s work. There was actually some type of crude photocopying process used at the Board for certain purposes. I recall that it involved some kind of chlorine mixture, and my impression at the time was that one should stand as far back as possible, given the health hazards that the process likely involved. (For you youngsters out there, the first time that I remember considering having anything photocopied, which we called “xeroxed” in those days, was around 1970, when I was completing my Master’s thesis. In the end, I wasn’t allowed to proffer photocopies to Old McGill. That venerable institution required the submission of one original and two carbon-copies of a thesis, on 100% rag paper, and bound, of course. Can you imagine making corrections on the carbon copies? Oh yes, corrections: those had to be gently done with an eraser and the typewriter. There were electric typewriters in those days, but they were not the IBM Selectronics that arrived a little later. )

 I have recently started working my way through a massive thesis from the early 1980s by William H.L. Godsalve on the æsthetic functionality of film music, using some of my father’s work to assess the validity of his argument concerning the centrality and significance of an æsthetic variable that he calls tensity. I will doubtless contribute something about this to a web site on Robert Fleming on which I am currently working. The Godsalve thesis, which I have only recently acquired, includes reference to some very interesting comments by Dad’s various colleagues about him as a musician and a complex personality, the value of whose film work was in their view insufficiently recognized and valued by some. Part of what was related was news to me, but none of it was inconsistent with my own knowledge and impressions of my father, his ambitions, his musical intentions, his self-conception, and his interpersonal relations.

Dad’s regular composer colleagues at the NFB included Louis Applebaum, Phyllis Gummer (who might have predated his arrival), Eugene (“Jack”) Kash, Eldon Rathburn, Maurice Blackburn, Soapy Douglas, and Kenneth Campbell. I never met Ms Gummer or Mr. Campbell. At various points, particularly in the early years of the NFB, John Weinzweig, Godfrey Ridout, Howard Cable, Oscar Morawetz, Clermont Pepin, William MacAuley, Lucio Agostini, and Harry Somers also wrote music for the Board. And, others on regular staff did as well, on a very occasional basis: Norm Bigras and Joan Edward come to mind.

I have a few comments to make about some other interesting NFB employees I encountered, one way or the other. In the Ottawa days, one of our back-fence neighbours was Leslie MacFarlane, father of Brian of Hockey Night in Canada fame, although I don’t remember ever seeing Brian when I was a child. (He is 15 years my senior, so might well have departed the household by then.) Leslie MacFarlane’s regular employment in the early 1950s was at the NFB.  I think he was a scriptwriter. At some point, I discovered that he had written many of the Hardy Boys books, which my parents had never bothered to tell me despite my rather obvious obsession with reading all of the works of “Franklin W. Dixon”. (This was before I graduated to reading G.A. Henty.) Perhaps my parents were not aware of this, at the time: apparently Mr. MacFarlane had stopped taking these projects on after 1947, having completed 22 Hardy Boys books by then. (He also wrote some Dana Girls mysteries, under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, the nom de plume also used by someone else to write various Nancy Drew mysteries.) During the Ottawa and early-Montréal years, James Simpkins worked at the NFB as an artist. He and my Dad got along well. He is better known for his Jasper the Bear cartoons in Macleans magazine. My brother Richard finagled an original Jasper cartoon from him at some point when we lived in Pointe Claire, where he also resided. It still hangs in Richard’s home. The sound editor that I mentioned earlier, Joan Edward, did sketches of each of the Fleming children at some point, although I actually don’t remember sitting for mine. It must have happened when she visited us at home, probably when we were still living in Pointe Claire.

I got to meet Norman McLaren once, at some point in the early 1960s, but I was timid and he was preoccupied, so that was that. And, over the years, I heard Dad talking to Mom about various goings on, who was proving difficult, and who was great to work with at the Board. Names that came up regularly included John Grierson, although the great eminence was gone before Dad arrived; Ross McLean, who ended up as Commissoner himself in the late 1940s; Albert W. Trueman; Guy Roberge; Grant McLean; Sydney Newman; James Beveridge; Tom Daly; Michael Spencer, who was my brother Michael’s godfather and a neighbor in Ottawa; Julian Biggs; Donald Brittain; David Bairstow; Nicholas Balla; Colin Low; Guy Glover; Norman MacLaren; Joseph Koenig; Robert Anderson, whose children called him Bob, those little bohemians; John Howe; Laurence Hyde; and Roger Blais, who directed the filming of one of my Dad’s ballets, Shadow on the Prairie, in 1953.

I enjoyed going to the cafeteria at the Film Board, which I did a couple of times, where I met various of Dad’s other colleagues from outside of the Music Department. There were some fascinating characters there. One, whose name I have now forgotten, was somewhat notorious for having lost toes on each foot as a result of losing control of his power mower while cutting the grass wearing sandals. Another one was, I swear, eight foot something, and had significant difficulty negotiating doorways. For some reason, I was also fascinated by the blind gentleman who took payment for purchases in the cafeteria. Ron Alexander, one of the re-recorders, struck me as a kind person, who gave the appearance of being truly interested in whether I was having an interesting time. There was also a Jackie Newell of whom I was vaguely aware, who I guess worked as a sound editor. In 1964, I got to know her daughter, who was a fellow victim of the machinations of the Canadian Pacific Railroad empire, our summer employers at the Banff Springs Hotel. My family once visited the home of NFB director Robert Anderson and family, who lived a few blocks from us in Westboro, in the West End of Ottawa, and after my father’s death I encountered him again, as we were, along with others, seeking to set up a process for establishing a scholarship in Dad’s memory.

The NFB seemed altogether a busy, interesting, and congenial place. Perhaps its denizens were behaving themselves when the youngster was around. I was well aware that there were pervasive artistic-temperamental differences, especially under the pressure of looming deadlines, and that there was an undercurrent of linguistic and political tension with which my father was particularly uncomfortable as, unlike his son, he avoided politics as much as he could.  I also knew that my father occasionally worked pretty much non-stop for two, even three days, at a time and I have discovered, in reading some of his correspondence with his parents, that he had a major physical collapse at one point as a result.

In 1962-63, I was in my first year at McGill but was still commuting from the far reaches of the West Island. Normally, I took the CPR train from Ste. Anne de Bellevue to Windsor Station every weekday morning. One Monday, for some reason, my Dad drove me in to the Town of Mount Royal station, which was not far from the Film Board, and I took the CNR train under the mountain to Central Station, instead.  Either route, as I worked my way to campus on foot that first year, so as to pass through the Roddick Gates towards Moyse Hall or the Stephen Leacock Building, I walked by the sites of two recent FLQ bombings. One had been across from the gates, in a garbage pail behind the RCAF recruiting station, and the other by the post office on University Avenue, just behind Place Ville Marie. At some point in the Spring of 1963, I went into work with Dad only to discover that, reflecting the atmosphere of the times and the nature of the NFB’s mission, there were new routines involved in entering the building. The NFB was of course a culturally-significant, federal institution in an increasingly fractious social milieu, having itself survived a “red scare” period post-Gouzenko, and with a significant number of Board employees with Québec-nationalist sympathies, as well. Certainly the history of the NFB in recognizing and embracing official-linguistic duality was not the best, so it was natural to assume that it might be a target for symbolic or more odious expressions of opprobrium. As a result, one had suddenly to endure brief interviews and searches of one’s belongings, and potentially of one’s person, prior to entering the building, even if one was known to be related to an employee. I always wondered what the old commissionaires at the door would actually have done if anything untoward were to have arisen under their watch. They didn’t seem too imposing, or particularly spry, to me.

I should note a few film music projects of my father’s that that I consider significant.

• “Red Runs the Fraser” (1946), Dad’s first NFB assignment.
• “Rising Tide” (1949), about the co-operative movement in Atlantic Canada. This is still an interesting piece.
• “Shadow on the Prairie” (1953), a film of Dad’s second ballet, choreographed by Gweneth Lloyd, my sister’s godmother, and danced by the Winnipeg Ballet before it was designated as “Royal”.
• “Man of Music” (1959), for which my father did script work, as it was about his mentor, Healey Willan.
• “Down North” (1960), which concerned development along the mighty MacKenzie River.
• The “Canada at War” series, developed between 1958 and 1962, and first broadcast in 1962, involved thirteen half-hour films, “culled from more than 16 million feet of film shot by Canadian, British, American, German and Russian cameramen.”  This involved the writing of a tremendous amount of music, and involved all four of the staff composers at the time.
• The “Lewis Mumford on the City” series (1963), involving six 27-minute films, all the music for which was done by Robert Fleming.
• “Phoebe” (1965), a significant fictional production about a pregnant teenager, with almost all of the music involving solo piano bridging of the various sequences.
• “Antonio” (1966), a beautiful fictional work concerning the psychology and sociology of an old man, with Robert Fleming’s affecting music performed by Tony Romandini on mandolin and guitar. This film was given intensive analytical attention in the Godsalve thesis.
• The “Tuktu” series (1967), which entailed thirteen 15-minute films aimed at children, directed by Robert Anderson.
• “Kurelek” (1967), an unusual but beautiful film, the images for which consisted primarily of pans over and zooms into and out of William Kurelek paintings from his years in Europe and Canada, with some of my favourite of Robert Fleming’s film music. (I am pretty sure the musicians used included Gordie Fleming on accordion, Tony Romandini on mandolin and zither, and Rodolfo Massella on bassoon.) I have provided an URL for the video below.
• “The Best Damn Fiddler from Calabogie to Kaladar” (1968), another fictional film, starring Chris Wiggins, Kate Reid, and the young Margot Kidder, for which Robert Fleming was credited for music editing.
• The “Struggle for a Border” series (1968), nine 60-minute films that involved 412 minutes of music, all composed by my father. This strikes me as an absolutely remarkable feat.
• I am also convinced that those one-minute nature vignettes with the lovely pastoral flute melody that those of us of a certain age remember seeing so often on the CBC, and which one occasionally sees parodies of on CBC comedy shows, involve music written by Robert Fleming. I did confirm some years ago that the first ones were produced by the NFB. That I cannot at the moment remember the name of these minute-long pieces is perhaps a symptom of my being of that “certain age”. It is interesting what one can, and cannot, remember, at any particular point in time.

http://www.nfb.ca/film/kurelek

I will note again that I often used NFB films in class, while teaching over forty years at McMaster and Mount Allison, usually in connection with courses on socialization, structured social inequality, and language and ethnicity.  The first such films that impressed me while I was myself a student were “The Things I Cannot Change” and “The World of One in Five”, along with other films associated with the NFB’s Challenge for Change program. Of course, as a reasonably aware citizen interested in worthwhile theatrical film releases, I was thrilled to see the emergence of such works as Mon Oncle Antoine (1971), Kamouraska (1973), J.A. Martin, Photographe (1977), and Le Déclin de l’Empire Américan (1986), all NFB productions or co-productions.

Perhaps I shall round off my recollections of the NFB by noting that the number of films available on-line through one of the NFB web sites has increased exponentially over time.  In addition, the complete catalogue of over 13,000 NFB films and information on the history of the institution, films involving specific production personnel, and so forth are available on another web site. In addition, there are now two good apps available that provide access to and information about NFB films and the work of Norman McLaren, in particular. I check periodically, to see what has been added.

Berkeley Fleming

Sackville, NB

Squeeze Box Jazzers

I recently gave an eight-week jazz appreciation course, in which we spent one of the two-hour classes considering performers on “miscellaneous” instruments. Accordionist Art Van Damme was recognized for ten consecutive years under this residual category by Down Beat magazine, now in its eightieth year. My guess is that the only players who came close to rivaling Van Damme in frequency of recognition under this rubric would have been the incredible multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk and, in more recent years, the inventive bop harmonica player “Toots“ Thielemans, both of whom happen to be favourites of mine.

The accordion and its practitioners have been the object of many, many jokes. Some people find the accordion downright annoying. They associate it with pimply-faced and ham-fisted, if earnest, adolescent music students; Slovenia-style polka players, like Canada’s own Walter Ostanek; schmaltzy, grandparent-pleasing television performers, like Lawrence Welk, or Myron Floren on Welk’s Show if one just couldn’t get enough “Lady of Spain”; and accompanists to excessively lachrymose Italian crooners. For these reasons, I thought it important to seek to rehabilitate the reputation of the accordion and its players, and what better way to do that than to recommend some jazz accordionists?

 Having consulted various lists, and having constructed my own compilation, I couldn’t help but notice that close to half of the major jazz accordionists identified (30 of 62, to be precise) are people with apparently Italian surnames, and they are disproportionately Italian-Americans, as well. Come to think of it, that makes a certain amount of sense, given the history and sociology of the instrument, of jazz as popular music, and of patterns of migration to and within the United States. Accordions and concertinas were introduced into what is now central Italy through French troops allied with the Papal State around 1860, after which the accordion became defined as an instrument of the common people, and significant numbers of accordions, some recognized as particularly fine instruments, were soon produced by skilled artisans in various parts of Italy. Around that same time, a massive southern-Italian migration to the United States occurred, mainly between 1880 and 1920. In the middle of that period, the number of worldwide exports of Italian-made accordions exploded, and some of the Italian immigrants to North America brought aptitudes and skills with them that led to the establishment of music schools, many dedicated to the teaching of the instrument. Jazz was emerging as a new musical genre in the latter half of that period. It reached the height of its popularity as a dominant form of American music in the 1930s and 1940s, precisely when second-generation Italian-Americans were found in significant numbers in many cities in the Northeast. The ascendance of jazz coincided with the demographic vitality of Italian Americans and the rise of the accordion as a significant jazz instrument. However, the accordion became marginalized and faded into relative obscurity, at least in the jazz world, by the 1960s.

As it happens, we did not end up devoting all that much time in class to jazz accordionists, because I had much more to say about and play from various amazing harmonicats, fiddlers, and Hammond B3 organists. I did, however, introduce the class to three jazz accordionists that I had personally witnessed play, each of whom I consider outstanding, in his own unique way.

Prior to discussing these three, I would mention two other accordionists whom I strongly admire. One is Flaco Jiménez, an outstanding musician in the Conjunto Tejano tradition, but try as I might I cannot construe what he does as jazz, and, in any case, I have never seen him live. My other favourite accordionist these days, and I have seen him perform twice, is the apparently hard-drinking, cabaret-style, klezmer artist, Geoff Berner, but again, that has nothing to do with jazz. It has rather to do with his sardonic humour and charmingly truculent political insights, although I must say that I prefer his Rhinoceros provocations to his Green pronouncements, perhaps because they are easier for a staunch New Democrat to controvert. It is so difficult to appear more earnest than a proselytizer for the green cause.

The first jazz accordionist I would recommend to your attention is Gordie Fleming. I have discussed him in an earlier blog, in which I outlined my fitful adventures as an impresario. As I said then, Gordie and I were not related, although, as it happens, he and my father were friends and collaborators. Fleming was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1931, and died in 2002.  At five, he was already appearing at the Beacon Vaudeville Theatre in Winnipeg, and continued in the circuit until he reached the ripe old age of ten. After that, he was involved in various Western Canadian army camp tours, and many private and CBC radio coast-to-coast network presentations during the war.  After performing for four years in various Winnipeg nightclubs, and having lost his accordion in a fire, he left for Montréal with his friend, drummer Billy Graham, who introduced him to the music of Charlie Parker.  During his Montréal years, which began in 1949 and ended in 1997 when he moved to Toronto, Fleming played at venues such as the Bellevue Casino, the Downbeat, the El Morocco, the Esquire Show Bar, and the Penthouse. At different points in his career, he was on the same bill as such American jazz figures as Cab Calloway, Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstein, Lena Horne, and Charlie Parker, and his own jazz collaborators included Al Baculis, Michel Donato, Buddy DeFranco, Buck Lacombe, Yvan Landy, Pete Magadini, Tony Romandini, and Herbie Spanier. When in Toronto, Fleming was a regular player at Bourbon Street and George’s Spaghetti House, although he was plagued by illness in his latter years. He was on hundreds of radio and television programs throughout his career, including Jazz en Liberté, CBC Showcase, Jazz Set, and Jazz Canadiana. Fleming played in Florida in the winter months for quite a few seasons, thus no doubt keeping in direct touch with some of his Montréal fans!

As I have reported before, Fleming brought a trio to play at a dance that I helped organize in the early 1960s at the Montreal Diocesan Theological College, thus contributing to my nascent and somewhat fragile self-definition as a hipster.  The highlight for me was when the members of the trio, which I believe included a young Michel Donato on bass, were able to play “Watermelon Man” on request.  Like many accordionists, Fleming made his living playing pretty well every style of music, including jazz, folk, pop, world, and classical, and in every kind of setting, including sock hops, formal dances, weddings, and bar mitzvahs. (Apparently he played a mean hora.) Some of you might have heard him accompanying Canadian folk singer Alan Mills, back in the day. There are at least four Newfoundland folk song examples of that on YouTube, at the moment. See, for example, “Feller from Fortune” (1958).

Fleming also played with Hank Snow while still in Winnipeg, appeared on the Arthur Godfey Show in his twenties, accompanied fiddler Ti-Jean Carignan (I have two of those LPs), collaborated with The McGarrigle Sisters (again, I have those LPs), and, apparently, backed up Cat Stephens, as well. At various points in his career, he accompanied Pauline Julien, Willie Lamothe, Félix Leclerc, Edith Piaf, Ginette Reno, and Tino Rossi. He was also involved early on in “world music”, and scored a number of films and television programs.

 Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate any video of Gordie Fleming playing. An audio anthology of his jazz work, According to Gordie, is available on CD, however. It was put together some years ago by his daughter, Heidi Fleming, who is in the music business herself. (She represents a number of jazz acts, including Michel Donato, Christine Jensen, Nordic Connection, Chet Doxas, and François Bourassa.) There are five available excerpts from the Fleming compilation, and a bonus partial track, online. They can be all found through the link below (look for “listen”) and will give you a sense of why he was praised for his playing by jazz musicians Guido Basso, Michel Donato, Jim Galloway, Oliver Jones, and Art Van Damme himself, as well as by music writers like Paul Baran, Irwin Block, Ira Gitler, Gene Lees, Mark Miller, and Wilder Penfield III. Fleming’s bop propensities are most obviously evident in “Scrapple from the Apple”, and I dare you to tell me that “Parisian Thoroughfare” doesn’t put a smile on your lips!

http://famgroup.ca/gordiefleming/navigation/gordie.htm

The second impressive accordionist I would recommend is Sivuca (1930-2006), an albino Brazilian whose full name was Severino Dias de Oliveira. Also a guitarist, he was well known among musicians for successfully fusing traditional regional (particularly forró) and urban (e.g., Chorinho) Brazilian styles of music with bossa, jazz, and classical forms. I first saw him performing with Bobby Rosengarden on the Dick Cavett television program in the late 1960s, and subsequently in a concert performance with Oscar Brown, jr. of the latter’s Broadway presentation, Joy, for which Sivuca was also the musical director. (Of course, I have the LP.)  I narrowly escaped joining the troupe on stage that evening, as Oscar was prowling the aisles of the theatre encouraging us to follow him up there at one point, but I held back. (I was afraid that they might expect me to dance.) My friend David did go up, however. He was always more adventurous than I. What struck me as most impressive about Sivuca’s performance was his practice of doubling what he was playing with his voice, the latter usually an octave higher, but there were also all sorts of other contrapuntally and rhythmically complex things going on in what he was playing that intrigued me.

Web entries on Sivuca indicate that he began playing for a living as young as nine; recorded his first album at the age of twenty; and had already by then become well-known throughout Brazil and even beyond. He toured Europe with a Brazilian Caravan group, and later moved there, settling eventually in France for five years, before returning to Brazil briefly and then moving to New York. He lived in New York City from 1964 to 1976, and while there worked as guitarist and later musical director for Miriam Makeba for four years in the late 1960s, as musical director for Oscar Brown, jr. in 1970, and in the same capacity for Harry Belafonte from 1971 to 1975. He also visited Sweden in the late 1960s, and in the 1980s and 1990s worked with jazz musicians in Scandinavia. He recorded many Brazilian music albums and had numerous international hits throughout his career. Particularly noteworthy are various jazz recordings with the aforementioned Toots Thielemans in the mid-1980s (e.g. Chiko’s Bar, 1986) and performances with samba/jazz guitarist Baden Powell as late as 1997.

Here is one of the numbers involving his vocal doubling device, that I saw Sivuca perform on Cavett, and then again with Oscar Brown, jr, in late 1969 or early 1970: “Céu e Mar”.

There is also on YouTube a delightful half-hour video of Sivuca in Sweden in 1969, just before I saw him play in New York, from which this clip of his performance of “Céu e Mar” is excerpted. It also features Putte Wickman and Monica Zetterlund, and provides a wider idea of Sivuca’s capabilities in jazz form.

I recommend that you check out the choro interpretation provided by a more mature Sivuca of Luperce Miranda’s waltz brilliante showpiece, “Quando Me Lembro”.

There’s also a long video of Toots Thielemans with Sivuca and Swedish singer Sylvia Vrethammar in “Rendezvous in Rio”. For a real treat, jump right to 6:00 and watch at least until 11:25 for an idea of what Thielemans could do!

And now I turn to the most recent of the three jazz accordionists on whom I am concentrating, Marin Nasturica. There is a connection to Gordie Fleming, in a way, since I encountered Nasturica as a result of the Catbird Jazz Society having brought the Donato-Nasturica-Gearey trio to George’s Roadhouse in 2008. You might recall my earlier comment that Donato had played bass with Gordie Fleming when he started his career. I might add that Donato, and note the ethnicity implied by his surname, started as an accordionist himself, before switching to studying bass at the Conservatoire in his teens. (Our times there might have slightly overlapped.) The initial attraction of bringing this group to Sackville was the opportunity to hear the highly-regarded Donato play. The bonus, I thought, would the chance to check out the seven-string guitar player and the Romanian accordionist. Notwithstanding prior publicity, Nasturica’s prodigious technique and quiet charisma were not fully appreciated ahead of time, so the room was buzzing pretty early on during the performance.

Before the late-afternoon sound check, Donato and I had to go over to Mount Allison to borrow an appropriate bass with the lowest possible bridge – classical players need them high – which was a bit of an adventure. When we returned, we did a little kibbitzing. When he heard that we might have been been at the Conservatoire at the same time, and in the course of explaining to me what he does when he works with students himself, he challenged me to sing “O Canada” as if it were in a minor key. It was some kind of test, I guess. I whistled a few bars. If I failed the test, he did not make it too obvious. After the sound check, I had a chance to talk to Nasturica, as well. He wanted to know whether there were any music shops in town. It turns out that he is always on the prowl for old accordions. I directed him to Ernie Sears’s place. I suspect he came up empty on that occasion.

Nasturica was born into a musical family in Romania, and began to play the accordion at four, encouraged by his grandmother. (So, I think it’s fair to say, all three of our jazz accordionists were child prodigies.) At his father’s behest, Marin later pursued formal violin and piano studies in a conservatory, but continued to focus his attentions on the accordion, which required that he work with private teachers as well. At the age of ten, much later than Fleming had started doing vaudeville, but about the same age as Sivuca began to play for money, he was appearing in cafés. By sixteen, he was regularly performing with popular Romanian singers, live and on radio and television. By nineteen, he had begun a busy career touring around the world, throughout Europe of course, and regularly to Asia and North America as well. This has continued now for more than forty years, although he has made his home in Montréal since 1987, having already toured Canada seven times by that point.

In addition to his work as an accompanist and a brilliant soloist, in many musical styles – classical, gypsy, Romanian, Russian, and jazz – Nasturica has contributed music to a number of movies, including the delightful soundtrack of the Oscar-nominated animated feature, Les Triplettes de Belleville. He has a massive repertoire, but it is on jazz that he focuses his attention these days, and for that I am grateful.

Nasturica’s performance for Catbird that night included a number of incredible and extended opening cadenzas, when the other two musicians would just lay out and let him go. The jazz regulars, the soundman, the people working the bar, and the classical cats in the audience that night were all blown away, and there was a lot of head-shaking going on along with the foot-tapping. My personal favourite that evening was the performance of “Dark Eyes” (Ochi chyornye), the beautiful “Russian melody”, probably written by Russified German composer Feodor Hermann, that has become a jazz standard. I first heard this piece played as a jazz number on an album by Eddie Condon and his All-Stars.  Eddie’s “Chicago School” Dixieland treatment of the tune was impressive, and quite humorous, but Nasturica approached it with both reverence and virtuosity.

Unfortunately, the YouTube videos available of Nasturica do not include any of him performing “Dark Eyes”. I can however embed an example of the trio’s performance in Brockville, Ontario of Gearey’s “Nasturicology”. The sound quality is not the greatest, and the video is cut off towards the end of the bass solo, but you will get the idea.

Finally, here is Nasturica playing a concert-piece rhapsody based on an Hungarian dance, the  “Csárdás”, by early-twentieth century Italian composer, Vittorio Monti.

I recommend two excellent CDs of Nasturica playing jazz. The one with Donato and Gearey, entitled Michel Donato Trio,  includes such numbers as “Dark Eyes”, “Nasturicology”, “Have You Met Miss Jones”, and “NHOP Blues”. Marin Nasturica and Friends includes “Someday My Prince Will Come”, “Black Eyes” [better known as “Dark Eyes”], “Donna Lee”, “Green Dolphin Street”, and “Body and Soul”. (The friends include Oliver Jones.)

Yule Blog: Sacred and Profane

It is my custom generally to avoid contact with Christmas music from my own collection until about mid-December, but since I took a peek into that particular corner of the den this past weekend, I thought, well, there’s a blog topic for you.

For me, Christmas used to be about church, and particularly about music in church. Christmas was of course a big season at Christ Church Cathedral, St. Columba’s, and St. George’s, the three churches in which I was a choir member, from age 7 to about 18. At St. George’s, I also had server duties to squeeze in, as required. Christmas was a happy time of year in the Fleming household. Sure, they were busy days, but the food was plentiful and spectacular, and we saw all sorts of friends and relatives, particularly on Christmas Eve, when there was a carol service, and again on Christmas morning, when we all attended the 9:30 service, following which we prepared for Christmas Dinner. Oh yes, and there were the presents. Dad was as easy-going a man as one could expect of a composer and music director who volunteered as an organist and choirmaster and was constantly under the creative pressure imposed by looming deadlines, but he was never happier than he was during the Christmas season. Even the family dogs shared the positive energy associated with that time of year.

When I was young, we sang all the conventional Christmas carols. They included Away in a Manger, Silent Night, O Little Town of Bethlehem, The First Nowell, Adeste Fideles, Good King Wenceslas, Once in Royal David’s City, O Come, O Come Emmanuel, We Three Kings, O Holy Night/Minuit, chrétiens, Christians Awake, Joy to the World, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, and, of course, what we insisted on calling While Shepherds Washed Their Socks by Night. These were all mainstays of pretty well every church I ever attended. At the Cathedral and St. George’s, we also performed several less often heard carols that particularly resonated with me, and I realized the other day that their music was invariably 14^th to 16^th century in origin. I am thinking, for example, of What Child Is This? (Greensleeves), Lullay My Liking, In Dulci Jubilo, The Holly and the Ivy, The Coventry Carol, and, especially, Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming. The latter two are, to me, the most beautiful of Christmas carols. My godfather’s 20th century setting of The Huron Carol (“’Twas in the Moon of Wintertime”), the melody of which apparently comes from a 16^th century French folk song, was a personal favourite as well, and it remains widely used in Canadian churches, as I understand it.  In the St. George’s Church years, as an emergent baritone, I particularly enjoyed singing Ding, Dong Merrily on High, because of the bass line.

Here is a link to a lovely rendition of “Lullay Myn Liking” by the Winchester Cathedral Choir and one treble in particular. Unfortunately, the embedding facility has been disabled for this, but the link will take you to the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zx9JA2DOow

And here is Frederica von Stade with the American Boy Choir performing “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming”.

The Westminster Cathedral Choir does a lovely job of “The Coventry Carol” here.

On top of all this, there were my Dad’s own carols. Early in life, I became aware that one of his early compositions, We Be Silly Shepherds (words by Nora Holland), had been published by a mass-circulation magazine that some of you will remember, the Canadian Home Journal, in 1952.  (I have since learned that it was just the second song that he had ever composed, at 16, in 1937.) There were copies of that page in our Ottawa house.  A 1942 carol, The Oxen, set to words by Thomas Hardy, was published by Oxford University Press in 1945. It is still occasionally heard at Christmas services in Anglican Churches in Canada. No Crowded Eastern Street (Frieda Major, words), one of two Fleming compositions in the red, joint UCC-ACC hymn book published in 1971, is also performed, as might be the rather more obscure and unfortunately titled The Ballad of Mary and Joe, with lyrics by the former Dean and Rector of Christ Church Cathedral in Ottawa, Herbert O’Driscoll.

There were other carols by Robert Fleming, as well. More than two dozen were written with my mother, Margaret Fleming, in a tradition that began in 1949 and carried on right up to my father’s death in 1976. These were sent out every year to friends and family in lieu of a Christmas card, and there was always quite a production involved in getting the words and music set, choosing or designing an apt illustration, having the carol printed, stuffing and addressing envelopes, affixing postage, and delivering the cards to the post office. I was pretty much removed from all of that from 1967 on, but I gather that it continued in an increasingly expanded fashion over the last decade of Dad’s life.  And of course it involved yet another deadline, which I suspect came perilously close to being missed on more than one occasion. Most of my parents’ carols were included in a posthumously released anthology entitled, A Wreath of Carols, which is still available from Waterloo Music, and there is a recording of all but one of those carols, with the added bonus of a rendition of the aforementioned carol, The Oxen, in an album entitled A Canadian Christmas released by the Jubilate! Chamber Choir some years ago. (Various other CDs have been issued that include one or two of my parents’ carols, as well.)

I particularly remember the Fleming carols that I participated in singing, or heard, while young.  Show Me The Way to the Manger (1956) and Sing Praise to the Christ Child (1957) are the ones most familiar to me. The singing of Show Me the Way to the Manger was always done by the children’s choir at St. George’s, while we processed alone through the church to the crêche, a particularly apt tradition given the occasion and the nature of the words.

At Broadview Public School, Lakeside Heights Elementary School, and during my one year at John Rennie High School, there were holiday-related assemblies that involved Christmas and Christmas music, but not at Macdonald High, which did  not have a choir. Of course, Linda and I have attended innumerable Christmas assemblies and concerts, as first our two children and later our six grandchildren have participated in them over the years. We have also been known to attend church when our Sackville grandchildren have had Christmas-related roles to play in recent times.

I get my fill of sacred Christmas music around this time of year, first by dragging out the old Ferrier and Forrester albums/CDs involving beautiful renditions of traditional carols and, especially, songs from The Messiah. I have never actually been to a performance of The Messiah, and have certainly never had the experience of singing it in a mass choir, as have some acquaintances. However, as mentioned in a previous blog, we used to sing songs from The Messiah after dinner at Dio (and at my stag). My own specialties were O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion, The People that Walketh in Darkness, and He Was Despised. The Dio version of the latter entailed an exaggerated and mock ccchockk-ptewy expectoration at one critical moment. Hilarity inevitably ensued.

Here are links to audio clips on YouTube of Kathleen Ferrier performing “He Was Despised” and “Silent Night”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH3E64G0oCI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1_4Hie–UMHe

I also try to listen once or twice each season to certain favourite “high art” recordings.

• Janet Baker, Richard Lewis, and John Shirley-Quirk, Bach Choir, Choristers of Westminster Abbey, and the London Symphony Orchestra, David Willcocks, Conductor, performing Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Hodie: A Christmas Cantata. This is an absolute favourite, going back to when I first heard it in 1966. It is from my father’s collection of recordings. (I see that it is being offered on eBay for $150 at the moment.)
• Les Troubadors du Roi Baudouin,  Missa Luba and Christmas in Congo. This is something that I purchased for my Dad one Christmas, on the spur of the moment. I had been looking at small Christmas cards that I favoured in those days; they were printed by Benedictine monks somewhere in rural Québec, as I recall. Anyway, I heard part of Missa Luba in an ecclesiastical store of some sort, in Montréal, and decided to get the album for Dad. It is the only 10” LP that I ever purchased. Subsequently, I bought my own copy, in combination with Misa Criolla, Misa Flamenca, and Messe des Savanes, on two regular-size LPs: I did not find the other three pieces anywhere near as engaging, and I suspect that I have never listened to them since.
• The Gregg Smith Singers, The Texas Boys Choir of Forth Worth, The New York Brass and Percussion Ensemble, Gregg Smith, Conductor, and E. Power Biggs, Organist, What Child Is This?. This is a wonderful album as well. I acquired it in the late 1960s, while living in Greenwich Village.
• La communauté de Taizé, Nuit de Noël. I also gave this one to my Dad, and retrieved it a few years ago.
• Le Petit Choeur du Collège de Montreux, et Charles Jauquier, L’Esprit de Noël.
• Jacques Labrecque et la Manécanterie Meilleur, Noëls et Carillons.
• Mhlas Glansevin, The Welsh Night. My brother Michael gave me this for Christmas.
• Mahalia Jackson, Gospel Christmas.
• Joan Sutherland, with the New Philharmonia Orchestra and the Ambrosian Singers, Richard Bonynge, Conductor, Joy to the World.
  

I also on occasion re-sample certain student recordings, such as Christmas at the Mount Allison Chapel and the Elliott Chorale’s Psallité; LPs  by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (meh) and the Robert Shaw Chorale (double meh); Fritz Werner, Conductor, Bach Christmas Oratorio; and even Menotti’s Ahmal and the Night Visitors (NBC Orchestra).

On my plate for this year, stylus permitting, are the following, mostly recently retrieved from my father’s collection.

• The Renaissance Singers and the Choristers of Ely Cathedral, directed by Michael Howard, Music for the Feast of Christmas.
• The Cathedral Choir, Richard Westernburg, Conductor, and The Cathedral Boys’ Choir, David Pizarro, Organist and Master of Choristers , Christmas Eve at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
• Temple Church Choir, Dr. G. Thalben-Ball, Organist and Conductor, Christmas Carols.
• The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, Hervey Alan, Simon Preston, Organist, London Symphony Orchestra, David Willcocks, Conductor, On Christmas Night.
• The Choir of All Saints Margaret Street, Michael Fleming, Director of Music, and Dr. Arnold, Organist, A Complete Treasury of Carols for Christmas. This one involves my father’s cousin.
• The Choirs of the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Robert Bell, Director, Music for Advent and Christmas. I picked this album up during a recent visit to St. Mary Magdalene’s. It is still sealed.

I have never attended a performance of The Nutcracker, although I have seen bits of it on television over the years. I do listen to the music on occasion, but, more often than not, it’s one of the jazz versions that I have on LP. That observation brings me to the profane, or rather the secular, “cool Yule” music to which we invariably listen every year. Quite a bit of it gets played over a two or three week period.

The go-to album, to which I am inexorably drawn each year and on more than one occasion, is Leon Redbone’s, Christmas Island. The enigmatic Mr. Redbone, whose original name would appear to be Dickran Gobalian, has a real way with standards and classics from various traditions. Christmas-song highlights include “White Christmas”, “Blue Christmas”, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”, “Christmas Island”, and “Frosty the Snowman”. His renditions are skilled and authentic, and with just a slight bit of irony, but never to the point of detracting from the songwriter’s intent. Elvis Presley’s Christmas Album is another LP we used to play every year, and more than once. A few years ago, our son Michael gave Linda a CD with an expanded selection of Elvis singing Christmas songs from 1966 and 1971,­ as well as the original ones recorded in 1957, but it is to the latter, “young Elvis” cuts that we usually turn, especially “Blue Christmas”, “Here Comes Santa Claus”, and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”.  For real fun, we trot out The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album, with “Little St. Nick”, “The Man with all the Toys”, “Blue Christmas”, “White Christmas”, and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”.

The following video shows Leon Redbone performing “Blue Christmas”. He gets the better of Jay Leno in the little chat afterwards.

Here, Leon is joined by Dr. John for “Frosty the Snowman”.

Nostalgically romantic impulses occasionally draw me to pop Nat King Cole’s The Christmas Song and Johnny Mathis’s Merry Christmas into the CD tray during the season. Harry Belafonte’s To Wish You a Merry Christmas is a sincere, warm, and humane collection, well worth revisiting annually. The same cannot really be said for Anne Murray’s Christmas Wishes, which is pretty forgettable, unless one is a diehard Anne fan. Bruce Cockburn’s Christmas contains traditional sacred and gospel songs, presented in a generally diffident manner, which is just as well, because when Bruce comes out of his somnambulistic shell, as in his treatment of “Early On One Christmas Morn”, the delivery is downright annoying.  This is not Cockburn at his best.

The Chieftains, joined by Elvis Costello, Marianne Faithfull, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Rickie Lee Jones, Nanci Griffith, Jackson Browne, and others produced a real gem in The Bells of Dublin. Faithfull’s “I Saw Three Ships A Sailing”, Griffith’s “The Wexford Carol”, the McGarrigles’s “Il est Né/Ca Berger”, Browne’s “The Rebel Jesus”, Jones’s “O Holy Night”, Costello’s “St. Stephen’s Day Murders”, and Nolwen Monjarret’s “A Breton Carol” are all highlights, but the entire production is an integrated and convincing piece of art. I could listen to that album every day, at least during the Christmas season. Here’s Marianne Faithfull.

I only have two jazz Christmas song albums. One is so bad that I have been unable to bring myself to listen to it all the way through for a second time. Believe me, you will want to avoid A Jazzy Christmas in New Orleans, by “The Bourbon Street Players”. The other jazz Christmas CD, Six-String Santa, is reasonably good, but then it would be, because it involves the just-a-little-too-tasteful-on-this-occasion Joe Pass. I have a hunch that Kenny Burrell’s Have Yourself a Soulful Little Christmas might really be my cup of tea. It is on my wish list.

There are, of course, many individual Christmas songs that I enjoy. They include Charles Brown’s “Merry Christmas Baby”, Otis Redding’s cover of that tune, Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song”, Sinatra, Bennett, Cole, and even Krall’s covers of same, Bobby Helms’s Hank-Garland-bedecked “Jingle Bell Rock”, and the all-time classic, “Fairytale of New York”, by the Pogues, with Kirsty MacColl.

I have a few really schlocky Christmas singles that I could trash, but I think I shall spare you the details. And don’t get me started on the “ugh” albums that I have. We all have those lying around the house, right?

Berkeley Fleming

Sackville, N.B.

Choir Boy

“[S]ome to Church repair,
Not for the Doctrine, but the Musick there.”

 Although those familiar with the fuller context of this fragment of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism will recognize the distortion of the poet’s intentions occasioned by my excerpting, the resultant couplet pretty well sums up my conflicted attitude for the past forty years or more towards church music and religiosity.

Notwithstanding my dismay over petty and unseemly doctrinal squabbles witnessed while an undergraduate living in a theological college, and my inability to pretend that I still believed in a divine being, there is no denying that my love of music and taste for certain kinds of music was shaped significantly by early church music experiences, first as a treble – what high Anglicans and English Catholics call a boy soprano who sings in a choir – and for a short time as a baritone.

As I have mentioned before, that I grew up in the British choirboy tradition was no accident. My great-grandfather, Arthur Evelyn Fleming, was a Minor Canon and Præcentor at Gloucester Cathedral in the 1890s and early 1900s, and was apparently a not entirely successful Headmaster at the King’s School, Gloucester. My godfather, Healey Willan, was a highly influential Anglo-Catholic church composer. Both my father, Robert Fleming, and his cousin Michael, were significant church composers as well.  Healey Willan and I corresponded for a few years, starting when I was about ten. Copies of my letters to him are in his papers at the National Library and Archives, but his letters to me, and a signed photograph of him at the organ, which he called “the old girl”, have somehow gotten waylaid. I remain hopeful that I shall put my hands on them again one day. My second cousin, Michael Fleming, held a number of major posts as organist and choirmaster, at St. Alban’s, Holburn for eighteen years, for example; participated in the editing of the New English Hymnal; and served as Warden of the Royal College of Church Music.  My father’s main composition teachers were  both important church composers, Herbert Howells at the Royal College of Music, who had himself studied with Arthur E. Fleming as a boy, and Healey Willan, at the Toronto (now Royal) Conservatory of Music. Robert Fleming served as organist and choirmaster in a number of churches, starting in his late teens in Saskatoon, and later in Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal, Ste. Anne de Bellevue, and Ottawa again. He composed scores of hymns and carols, many settings of the liturgy, processionals and recessionals, wedding motets, and a well-known religious song cycle, entitled The Confession Stone (Songs of Mary).

So, at the age of seven, I joined the boys’ choir at Christ Church Cathedral, in Ottawa. I stayed in the choir until I was ten, at which time (1956) the Flemings moved from Ottawa to Pointe Claire, Québec. While in the Cathedral choir, I was strongly influenced by the organist and choirmaster, Godfrey Hewitt, as were my younger bothers Michael and Richard. Hewitt had declined an appointment as assistant organist at Westminster Abbey to take the position of organist and choirmaster at Christ Church Cathedral, Ottawa in 1931, and he stayed in that position until 1980. He continued afterwards at St. Barnabas Anglican Church. He was also a church composer, and of course the father of renowned Canadian pianist, Angela Hewitt. (I recall her impending birth having been big news in the Ottawa musical world, when we returned there for music festival purposes a couple of years after we had set off for Pointe Claire.)

My first year in the choir involved going to downtown Ottawa from Westboro on the streetcar after school (I think it was on Thursdays); transferring at Holland Avenue, shortly after Richmond Road had fed into Wellington Street; and getting off the second street car at the corner of Albert Street and Bronson Avenue, and then walking about a block to the Cathedral, on Queen Street. A very strong memory for me is of the slogan displayed throughout the streetcars in those days that commanded, “Défense de cracher”, which I quickly ascertained meant, “No spitting”.  This admonishment had something to do with public health and TB, no doubt, and proper manners, of course. The streetcar on the way to choir practice was often suffused with a golden light, as the sun was lying close to the horizon at that time of day, while on the way home the only light in the car would have been artificial. Another lasting memory is my walking up our dark, tree-lined street, Highland Avenue, from the streetcar stop on Richmond Road back to our house, which took my seven or eight-year-old legs about fifteen minutes to accomplish. I soon came to recognize that, as I worked my way up the hill, I was passing the homes of my brother Michael’s teacher at Broadview Elementary School, then my own teacher’s, then Michael’s godfather’s, and finally that of the Popes, who lived right next door.

Prior to choir practice, the young choristers would assemble on the grounds beside the church, within an area surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, and we would play, get this, rugby! Not full-bore rugby, mind you. Some of us were only seven. The older boys were in charge of the ball and determined who was on what team. I remember one time when a kicked ball ended up landing on a decorative spike on the fence, and the ball deflated, to our initial amusement but eventual dismay. The ball was generally kept in the crypt of the church. Early in our socialization as neophyte choristers, some of us learned where the key was hidden, so that one might gain entrance to the crypt, which was separated from the rest of the church by a locked, wire-fence door at the bottom of some janitorial stairs. Mind you, we younger ones would not have dared to take the ball out ourselves. One time, we briefly played something resembling floor hockey in the crypt. What a bunch of hooligans. (I am sure, however, that we were much better behaved than the louts who reputedly frequented the Gloucester choir school during my great-grandfather’s tenure as Headmaster there.)

After choir practice, we would be paid our weekly honorarium, which as I recall was in the neighbourhood of seventy-five cents, and in the first year, when I was on my own, I would promptly spend the difference between the amount of the honorarium and the cost of two streetcar tickets on “Animal Crackers”, purchased at a small shop near the church. I took special pleasure in proffering the tiny arrowroot “ zoo animals” to my siblings, especially the youngest, Margot. I felt pretty grown up and independent.

Sundays, we all went to the Cathedral for church, of course, except for my father, who was the organist at Glebe United at the time.  My brothers Michael and Richard soon joined me in the choir, and we all, including Margot, slipped out of the service at Communion time and went downstairs for Sunday School, leaving the Men’s Choir to soldier on in our absence. Later, we returned, and rejoined the men in the choir stalls, in time to help complete the service and then lead the procession out. (I can’t actually recall whether the various clergy might not have preceded us. If I had been properly trained, should I not be able to remember this?)

During the processional we wended our way along the top of the nave and into the sanctuary of the Cathedral, singing whatever we had practiced the previous Thursday. On special occasions, such as when Vincent Massey, the Governor General, was in the house, we would process down a side aisle to the back and then up the central aisle of the nave before entering the sanctuary. Recessionals were usually directly from the sanctuary towards the side door, presumably because everyone was by that time eager to get out of there. My boyhood chum, Robbie van Dine, became the Head Boy at some point. (His father was a close friend of my Dad’s and conducted various men’s choruses in Ottawa.) The picture that follows shows Robbie carrying the crucifix, the lucky stiff, and leading us out of the sanctuary. Having seen the earlier, angelic image of me in the ruffled collar, perhaps you will be able to figure out which one I am in the one below.

 

 As this was an Anglican Cathedral, there was plenty of liturgical music in between the processing and recessing, quite frequently plainsong written by Willan.  Several of his hymns were also performed regularly.

Godfrey Hewitt prevailed upon me to enter my first ever music festival class, which I did at the age of 9 (almost 10), performing a setting of William Blake’s, “The Lamb”.  He also put quite a bit of time into preparing me for the class. I came second, which seemed like quite a coup, at the time. I even received a congratulatory note from the Dean and Rector, Herbert O’Driscoll.  As it turned out, to my chagrin, I ended up specializing in coming second in vocal solo classes over the next few years, as I continued to participate in Ottawa Music Festival competitions, even after we had moved to the Montréal area. Dad was vocal coach and accompanist for the four Fleming siblings throughout this period.  First place in my vocal classes was typically gained by one William Bowen, who many years later I realized had, like me, become a sociologist! My brother Michael and I won the Freiman Trophy for our performances in duet competitions a couple of times, in 1958 and 1960. I would have been almost 14 at the time of the 1960 Festival, and I recall that the voice was really starting to go at that point. That was I believe the last time that I sang publically as a treble. My only solo performance as a baritone in a music festival was in 1963, at the Kiwanis Music Festival in Montréal, where I received the Francis H. Hopkins Grade B Vocal Trophy and some unexpected cash for my performance of Handel’s “Breathe Soft Ye Winds”. I should have kept going with singing lessons, but I did not. I also chose not to try out for the McGill University Martlets Choir, which I had considered doing.

Since I came to Mount Allison in the late 1970s, various people have importuned me to join Choral Society, on different occasions. I have routinely begged off by pointing that I have a throat condition that adversely affects my voice, which has been the case for many years. It has to do with post-nasal drip, I suspect. One year, when I trotted out this well-established defensive manouevre, the Director told me that he had the name of a good doctor to whom he could refer me, which gave me a bit of a start. I can’t recall how I begged off on that occasion: it might have been something to the effect that I had too many evening commitments already, which was certainly true.

Back to Ottawa in the 1950s. My brother Michael was a somewhat obstreperous youngster, at least in the eyes of some, and at one point raised the ire of one of the men in the Cathedral choir, who said something to the effect that “Your name will be mud around here”, unless Michael were to conform to higher standards of deportment. Later I learned that “mud” should have been spelled “Mudd”, as the expression was said to relate to the infamous Dr. Samuel Mudd who perhaps co-conspired with and certainly treated and hid John Wilkes Booth in his barn after, as the comedians would have it, someone asked Mrs. Lincoln, “Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” Still later, I learned that the expression, “Your name is mud” actually predated Samuel Mudd’s birth by at least ten years. It was a good story, though.

Michael, who had the sweetest treble voice I have ever heard this side of Ernest Lough (see below), eventually became an Anglican priest, and retired a couple of years ago, having ended up a somewhat loose Canon, as I have been known to opine. When he turned 50 in 1997, I wrote a piece of doggerel in his honour, which read as follows:

 Then and Now

Michael, Mike, name rendered “mud,”

as spake a cranky old curmud-

geon back in musty days of yore

(youthful verve he did abhor,

at least on grand Cathedral floor).

 What would he say today as you

receive respect appropriately due

the gentle, middle-ag-ed priest,

devoted father and helpmeet?

 Ernest Lough – Lough, my father always called him – was famous for still singing as a treble at age 16, in 1927. The piece in question was Mendelssohn’s “Hear My Prayer”.  My father would get positively misty-eyed when describing Lough’s voice, which he had heard initially through recordings that my grandfather had.

At some point in the 1960s, Dad acquired a copy of the HMV recording, The Ernest Lough Album: “My Life in Music”, probably as a gift from his father, who had a well-placed and reliable source in Victoria for hard-to-find English pressings.  I found that particular LP in the remnants of my father’s collection a few months ago, and noted that the first item on Side One is indeed “Hear My Prayer”. Looking at the nine other tracks, I see two others that I vividly recall hearing as a boy: Schubert’s “Who is Sylvia?” and Handel’s “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth”, the latter also sung frequently by my favourite contralto, (sorry Ms Forrester) Kathleen Ferrier. I played my first Ferrier album quite a bit when I lived at the Montreal Diocesan Theological College. My friends found her pronunciation of certain words (such as “moun-tains” in “O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion”) hilarious, because they were so well-enunciated, and she so dignified in her approach. I silently dismissed their comments as completely philistine. Last year, I acquired a box set of the complete Decca Recordings of Kathleen Ferrier. I remain a devoted fan, and refer the uninitiated to her rendition of “Blow the Wind Southerly”. Surely it is on the web.

My father’s reverence for Lough’s voice gives me pause even now as I contemplate listening to the recently uncovered album on my own antiquated equipment. I believe I shall wait a while, that is until that new turntable has been acquired.

Here are two other small vignettes from Cathedral days. One Christmas, the boys’ choir trooped across the street and around the corner to an old folks’ home on Bronson, to sing Christmas carols. Even at my young age, I recognized that this was truly appreciated by the residents. Possibly the same year, it was announced that, in lieu of a choir party, we were all going to go to a theatre in Ottawa to see a movie, the admission having been paid on our behalf by a local business. It might have been Freiman’s Department Store. The movie in question was Guys and Dolls. I enjoyed it immensely. (I also realize that this might well have been prior to my having seen a movie that I recalled in an earlier blog entry as the first I had ever seen in a theatre.) My guess is that some parents were aghast that those of us at an impressionable age might have been adversely marked for life by what we saw, but, notwithstanding what I might have implied in last week’s blog entry, I did not thenceforward follow a dissolute life of drinking, gambling, thievery, and debauchery. More’s the pity.

My career as a choirboy continued after moving to Pointe Claire. My father took a job as organist and choirmaster at St. Columba’s Anglican Church in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, his NFB responsibilities and commissioned outside composition work apparently not occupying enough of his time. The three Fleming boys were in the choir there, along with sister Margot, and our mother as well.  So, we finally got to go to church together, although we were all working, as it were. One time during that period, which I believe lasted a couple of years, we youngsters were allowed to go down the street for hot chocolate at a small diner near the church, under my supervision of course, while the adult members of the choir were working on pieces from the performance of which we had been exempted, and I remember our contriving to play Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” on the jukebox several times while we were there. This gave us particular delight. As it turned out, the others in the diner seemed not to mind, which blunted our enjoyment somewhat. Another time, one of the choir members invited us to Sunday Dinner at her home, which I think might have been on Île Bizard, and one of her children played Elvis Presley’s “Teddy Bear” on a portable record player in her room. I liked the music, although I thought the delivery of the lyrics rather indistinct, but then, as faithful readers will recall, I was a little jealous of how Elvis seemed to affect the girls.

Our time at St. Columba’s was cut short by an opportunity that arose in 1958 for my Dad to become organist and choirmaster at a church closer to Pointe Claire, in Ste. Anne de Bellevue. (We actually ended up moving to Ste. Anne’s the following year.) The story goes that Dad was, for some reason, walking through the streets of Ste. Anne’s, and ran into a wartime acquaintance from Vancouver, the Anglican priest, John Kerr, with whom he had doctrinal, musical, indeed general affinities. Father Kerr explained that his church had recently burned down, but a new one was being built on the same spot, and he wondered whether my father might be interested in becoming the organist and choirmaster. His first order of business would be to choose the new organ. And so began my own time at St. George’s Church, kitty corner from the apparently stately home of the Misses Abbot, Christopher Plummer’s reputedly maiden aunts. (Some years ago, I learned that Christopher himself had been brought up in nearby Senneville.)

The new church had a clean, modern, almost Scandinavian look. It was very different from Christ Church Cathedral and St. Columba’s in ambience. The new organ turned out to be a Casavant, of course. It was a beautiful instrument. Father Kerr’s younger daughter Erica once got into the pipe room, and re-arranged the top halves of some of the pipes.  This caused quite a stir, particularly since, as I recall, it was discovered just before a service that was to be broadcast. Here is a somewhat-blurred picture of my father at the console of the Casavant.

 

 I was a regular member of the Junior Choir, and eventually the Adult Choir, at St. George’s. (I was also a regular “server”, up front, and sometimes had to work several services in a two or three day period.) The children in the choir adored my father, as did the adults, come to think of it. He had his favourite warm-up pieces, including our singing a capella the damsel’s complaint, “Early One Morning”, better known to some of you perhaps as the instrumental melody for the opening of The Friendly Giant.  The vocalists among my readership will perhaps recognize that singing this was a bit tricky because of the key it was typically performed in, and the intervals involved. At choir parties, Dad would play Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, and perform his two-minute one-person opera and “Twinkle, Twinkle” variations party tricks that I heard him doing at several adult parties in our various homes over the years, as well. (I have seen evidence in his diaries that Dad was doing this at least as far back as the early 1940s.)

There was a general shortage of men and particularly tenors in the St. George’s Adult Choir, and unfortunately for my father I was a baritone, so I was no help there. He would often have to sing the tenor line while simultaneously playing two keyboards with his hands, and of course another one with his feet. As a result of the dearth and sometimes the complete absence of tenors, quite a few of Dad’s church music compositions were actually written for SAB.

I used to stand beside “Mac” Algie, another baritone who, despite his being some kind of an accountant (Comptroller at McGill University, I think) had quite a sense of humour. He always carried much-appreciated Scotch mints in his jacket pocket. According to some letters from my father to my grandparents, Mr. Algie and I proved quite a handful on occasion, constantly cracking wise to one another when we should have been paying attention to whatever it was Dad was saying. I only vaguely remember ever misbehaving. I do recall laughing quite a bit. I was never, or seldom, the instigator.

My parents were quite close with the Algies, and with a number of other couples, one or both of whom were choir members, as might have been their children, as well. They were very happy in the St. George’s Church community, in which, as the long-time-time parish secretary, my mother was very much involved as well.  Much of that happened after I was effectively out of the picture, as a result of having started university, gone to live in Montréal, gotten married, and subsequently gone to New York City to further my education. Matters familial were occasionally strained once it became evident that I was no longer a believer. It was particularly awkward at times in that my brother Michael was studying for the priesthood at Trinity College during my early years of teaching at McMaster University. It certainly did not escape the family’s attention that we never arranged for our children to be christened.

While living in the Montreal Diocesan Theological College when an undergraduate I regularly attended compline for a while, which I found calming, and dutifully wore my academic gown to meals, as required by College rules. Occasionally, I would attend St. John the Evangelist, the Anglo-Catholic church in Montréal, with friends, and I really enjoyed the music, as well as the wonderful sermons by the priest, Father Wolfgang “Paul” Büsing, who had been part of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s underground Lutheran seminarian group prior to leaving for England, and eventually settled in Canada. I didn’t quite get the somewhat unsettling bells and smells that were pervasive at St. John the Evangelist, this not having been the practice even at the Cathedral in my Ottawa days. Of course, I was aware that this was a tradition also followed at my godfather’s haunts, the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Toronto, but I had never actually been there. This past summer, I finally visited St. Mary Magdalene’s, in connection with work I am currently doing on my father, who was in the SMM Choir while studying with Willan at the Conservatory in the 1940s. Below is a picture that I took last August of “the old girl”, who sounded wonderful. Following that is a photo of me standing beside a portrait of Willan at SMM, where it would appear that he is better remembered and memorialized than any of the priests.

 

 To round this all off, I might add that I was of course in school choirs as well, at Broadview Pubic School in Westboro, at Lakeside Heights Elementary School in Pointe Claire, and for one year at John Rennie High School in the same community. Astonishingly, given the relatively affluent nature of the population in its catchment area, which included toney Senneville and striving Baie d’Urfé , Macdonald High School in Ste. Anne de Bellevue had no choir, indeed no music program at all, while I was there. There isn’t much to report concerning my school choir experiences themselves, other than to note that I sensed at times that the choir directors were subtly according me somewhat undeserved respect because of their awareness of who my father was, or rather what he did. Once in a while, we would even perform some Fleming, usually his arrangements of various folk songs.

Nowadays, I go to church for weddings and funerals. There have also been occasional musical festival classes involving grandchildren, organ recitals, early music concerts, Flamenco guitarists, Tuvan throat singers, jazz ensembles, and art song performances that have drawn me, for example, to the Mount Allison Chapel, or to one of the local denominational outposts. I have also been known to attend church when I have somehow gotten wind that the “set list” includes some Fleming. For example, my father’s hymn, “Let There Be Light”, is used fairly regularly in at least three Canadian denominations, and a couple of American ones. When I attend funerals or even regular church services, as well as when I participate in Mount Allison University Convocations and Remembrance Day events, I catch myself singing, although often inwardly distancing myself from the meaning of the words, and this typically brings to mind some fond memories of my short life as a chorister.

Berkeley Fleming

Sackville, N.B.

I Might Have Been in a Drunken Stupor at the Time

Yes, I sometimes overindulged in alcohol in my youth: I was periodically “over-refreshed”, as Johnny Carson used to say. Unlike some, I have a pretty good recollection of what transpired upon such occasions. This might be because I knew my limit, which as I recall was four beers, or eight draft, and I was careful to count. I had to be cautious: I only weighed about 140 pounds, soaking wet. One did not want to lose control. This is a piece about certain of my youthful indiscretions, and how my recollections of them are all bound up with generally vivid musical memories. I have noticed that many people of my generation, like me, remember when certain songs came out by what grade (or year) they were in at the time. I also associate particular pieces of music with certain experiences that I have had.

Let me set the context.  This was a time when I was starting university, at 16; could not get a learner’s permit until I was 17 or – being male – drive until I was 18; and could not drink legally in a tavern or bar until I was 21.  I did, however, succeed in consuming alcohol, at least in pack situations, that is to say with my undergraduate buddies as we marauded through the streets of Montréal. This began happening once I had moved away from home and into residence during the school year, and even over the summers, as I worked in Banff in 1964 and Ottawa in 1965 and 1966. I got married in 1967, and more or less settled down.

Speaking of getting married, when we set off for our honeymoon on what was my first plane trip I was required to show id., even though the drinking age once one was in the air was supposed to be 18, and I was (just) 21. Unaccountably, Linda was not asked for her identification. I contained my indignation, and was served.  (Musical highlights of the honeymoon? Rolf Harris (“Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport”) and the Trinidad All-Star Steel Band, at some fancy hotel.)

I had, by the way, proposed to Linda in a bar. This was not as crass as it might sound. She had returned from a trip to see her grandparents in Florida and family friends in Nassau, and suspected that I was up to something when my parents absented themselves. (They had come with me to the airport because, well, I wasn’t driving yet.) Also, I might have mentioned looking at rings in a letter or two. (I had been working at Morgan’s during the Christmas season to raise the money.) So, Linda and I repaired to the Dorval Airport lounge for a few minutes. It was a lovely, snowy evening. The waitress brought Linda a pre-arranged drink, with a sparkler in it, and I somewhat sheepishly pulled out the ring. I don’t actually remember what music might have been playing in the lounge, but I am thinking it was a Johnny Mathis moment. She broke the tension by agreeing immediately. By the way, I did not ask her father’s permission beforehand. I was such a rebel.

Let me return to the earlier years. In high school, some of my friends drank, but I didn’t know it at the time. The older “hoods” did, and that was obvious. A couple of the girls were rumoured to partake, as well. I participated weekly in folk dancing in the basement of St. George’s Anglican Church, and one time a number of us ended up at someone’s house, when parents were nowhere in evidence. If there was alcohol taken out, I don’t remember it. I do recall hearing the song, “I Hear You Knockin’ (But You Can’t Come In)”,  which I was convinced involved some kind of sexual innuendo. I ended up having to call my parents to get them to drive a young woman home to the far end of Senneville, the ex-urban settlement next to my home town, Ste. Anne de Bellevue, because it was so late. I belonged to a fairly tame crowd. For us, the ritual of staying up all night after the Graduation Dance involved dancing (remember Ray Charles, “What’d I Say”?) in the church basement until 1:00 a.m. or so, with parental supervision, after which we went to a friend’s house, talked all night, and had breakfast before finding our way home.

We would of course go to the occasional school dance, sometimes even in couples, and we would often drift down solo to “the Coop” in Baie d’Urfé, where dances were held fairly regularly. (It was called “the Coop” because it was a converted chicken coop.) I always associate the Coop with “Bumble Boogie”, by B. Bumble and the Stingers, but hearing Del Shannon singing “Runaway” was the major highlight. It was the Musitron break in the middle that did it for me. (Years later, I discovered that the studio musicians involved in that recording included Bucky Pizzarelli and Milt Hinton, so no wonder I liked it so much!) I suspect there was some drinking going on outside the Coop. There was certainly some spectacular jitterbugging, especially by one guy named Alan, who always seemed to win the dance contests. He could have gotten onto American Bandstand, or at least onto the Montréal equivalent, Like Young. On the weekend a bunch of us would also play cards– mainly hearts – well into the university years, but only the one friend still in (private) high school drank to any extent. I worried about him.

In September of Freshman Year (1962-63), I was “rushed” by two fraternities at McGill, each presumably interested in increasing its collective academic average, because I certainly had neither money nor friends in high places nor the requisite social graces. (If you like, I lacked economic capital and social capital, and had cultural capital only of a rather more limited type than was considered desirable in those circles.) Fraternities were essentially sites for head bopping, boozing, and wenching, as my readers might well have guessed. Think Animal House. The two McGill fraternities that rushed me were quite different from one another, however. My friend Bob’s older brother John had been a stalwart of ZBT, Zeta Beta Tau, the membership of which seemed disproportionately to include Anglicans, Progressive Conservatives, and blazer-wearing denizens of Westmount or toney suburban or ex-urban communities near Montréal. I see from Wikipedia that ZBT was actually started in New York City by Zionists, established its first Canadian chapter at McGill in 1913, and has as its motto, “A Powerhouse of Excellence”. Their self-conception and my experience with them were in accord. The place seemed to me to be full of particularly confident and rich operators who were self-consciously aggressive “hounds”, if you know what I mean, and I, a naive 16 year old, was pretty uncomfortable with it all. I definitely felt out of my depth, and it was pretty evident that I was going to be blackballed after this was all over. I will say though that the music was good, and there was lots of beer. Ray Charles, Chubby Checker, Little Eva, the Isley Brothers, Dion, Sam Cooke, Roy Orbison, Del Shannon, Joey Dee and the Starlighters, Gene Pitney, Clyde McPhatter, the Everly Brothers, Booker T and the MGs, Bobby Darrin, Gary U.S. Bonds, and the inevitable Elvis and Ricky were all played, I am sure. The beer was Molson’s, of course. The year that they were checking me out, ZBT’s members included a David Angus, who I somehow understood was related to the Molson family. I see that there is a David Angus who is currently a lobbyist for Molson Canada, and served as Caucus Liaison officer for the Prime Minister’s Office in 1986-87, that is, when Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister. It is likely not the same David Angus, but, if not, he’s gotta be related!

Now that I think about it, I realize that I was invited by ZBT to three events, so maybe I made the long short list, although I certainly did not pass muster in the end. One of the other events was held on a beautiful Fall day at an estate in Senneville, probably the Angus one. This was handy, since I was still living at home in first year. There were a few girls at the event, and many of the people present were in tweeds and leather. I liked the horses. I also remember dragging a high school friend, Dorothy, to a ZBT party in Westmount hosted by someone whose surname was Timmins. Daddy was in mining. I think I was told that they had a helicopter pad on their roof. I was definitely out of my element with this crowd.

As for the second fraternity that rushed me, my cousin’s boy friend (later, husband) Marty had belonged to KRT, Kappa Rho Tau or Knights of the Round Table – hey, wait, maybe I did have connections, after all! – and they seemed somewhat more civilized and academics-oriented than ZBT, or perhaps they were just smaller, relatively impecunious, and/or more refined. They did have a reputation for being less elitist and more democratic than other fraternities, so I rather fancied my chances, and thought we might all prove sympatico. No such luck.  They had a costume party (I lamely wore a home-made serape and a sombrero), and held the obligatory “boat races” at the party, to which I was supposed to take a date. Her qualities and social skills were doubtless to be assessed as well. I brought Kathy, another acquaintance from high school, who was a student nurse at the Royal Victoria Hospital. I might have ended up enjoying membership at KRT more than at ZBT, but as it turned out I did not need to make up my mind, since neither sought to have me “pledge”. I got over it. (Really, I did.)

On the other hand, my high school friend and fellow Young Progressive Conservative, the aforementioned Bob, succeeded in being pledged to ZBT that year. Later, I discovered that another Montréal acquaintance, John, who eventually became a high muck-a-muck in the Anglican Church of Canada, was a member of ZBT as well. He was a particularly big Stones fan. I hear that he has retired, and lives up the road in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia these days. Meanwhile, another high school friend, Ron, got rushed by another frat, pledged, and became a consummate boozer and wencher, alarmingly so actually. I think it’s fair to say that he almost flunked out, but somehow he surfaced out of all of that, bore down, got into medical school, and became a successful doctor. One consequence of that was that he gave up his socialist principles, probably around the same time as I adopted mine!

I used to listen to classical music while studying in my room at home in first year. Two LPs got played over and over and over. They were Beethoven’s 6^th Symphony (the Pastorale, played by the London Philharmonic, conducted by Adrian Boult) and the Brahms Double Concerto (featuring Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky, conducted by Alfred Wallenstein). I can still sing or whistle the latter note for note, pretty much all the way through. There was no alcohol involved while I was studying.

My modest drinking career started slowly. Of course, I generally didn’t imbibe in public (or even in private) in my hometown, even in first year when I was commuting to McGill.  I might have been able to pass myself off as a Macdonald College student while in Ste. Anne’s, and avoid being recognized as a significantly under-aged townie, but I only tried twice. There was a tavern at the far end of town that did actually let me in with some friends once. My friend John almost blew my cover, because he had to throw up in the bathroom beside the kitchen that night. We professed not to know how he had gotten drunk. I’m not sure my parents believed us.  When I returned to that tavern alone and on crutches some months later, having had my first knee operation (at age 17), they would not countenance my entrance into their fine establishment. This was very wise of them. The Legion was also out: too many friends of my parents would have been there, and in any case it was less than a block from our house, right next to where my Uncle Bill lived. Larry Moquin’s was off limits for the same reason, although I would have loved to have gone for dinner and a show there with my parents. This was a nightclub run by an ex-wrestler of some renown in the Montréal area. Every year, Moquin’s had acts like the Ink Spots, and Professor Irwin Corey, perform. Lots of people drove out from Montréal, which in those days would have taken an hour or more, side-gawking all the way. (The houses on the Lac St. Louis side of Lakeshore Road were pretty impressive.) Others came out on the provincial bus, for dinner and entertainment. Some of you might remember that Canadian swimming gold-medal Olympian Victor Davis died on the streets of Ste. Anne de Bellevue, in the late ‘80s; after an evening of drinking his way up and down the main drag, he was hit by a 19-year old driver who was doubtless under the influence.

In second year, I moved into the Montreal Diocesan Theological College (“Dio”), right next to the High School of Montreal and just across the street from the McGill campus, and naturally became a more regular tippler. We would sometimes imbibe sherry in our rooms (quaint, eh what?!), and went out maybe twice a week. Recall that it was the rare occasion that I ever exceeded four bottles of beer. It was almost always Molson Export. Once in a while we would have Bock beer, in the Spring as I recall. Shandy was also a rare possibility. We weren’t allowed to sing in our regular haunt, the Mansfield Tavern. That was probably just as well: there was too much potential for political, religious, linguistic, or generational differences to rear their ugly heads. Sometimes we went to Toe Blake’s on Ste. Catherine West, or The Peel Pub, which as I recall had dangerously long and hard stairs down to the main entranceway, or to the Pocket’s place (the Pocket being the Pocket Rocket, viz., Henri Richard), which served green beer on St. Patrick’s Day. Every Fall, we would take new residents of the MDTC to Aux Quatres Coins du Monde, a gay bar on Stanley Street with great musical acts, just to see how long it would take the neophytes to figure things out. This was a College tradition. My favourite spot was the Esquire Show Bar, also on Stanley, where I saw Rufus Thomas as the opening act (and, yes, he did sing “Walkin’ the Dog”). He was followed by the headliner, the charismatic Ben E. King (“Stand By Me”, “There Goes My Baby”, “Spanish Harlem”, “This Magic Moment”, and “Save the Last Dance for Me”). That man could sing. (I saw him again, many years later, at a Prince’s Trust concert in London with son David.)

 

Fledgling marine biologist, eventual canon of the

Episcopal Church, future orthopedic surgeon, and

sociologist-in-training prepare to enjoy a little sherry

One time, two of my friends who were brothers both used the identification card of the one who was older (and could legally drink). The two of them were primed to make the claim that they were cousins if the waiter were to notice that the name looked familiar the second time, although he might then have asked to see both id.’s simultaneously. This potential problem was avoided by their sitting far apart at the large table we had camped ourselves around. The card was transferred from the one to the other under the table. This was at the then new CP hotel near the old train station. It’s still there: I always thought it resembled a cheese grater.

Another time we were at an unfamiliar joint, listening to Ray Charles sing “Crying Time” and “Let’s Go Get Stoned” on the jukebox, so we were obviously Anglos of very discriminating taste. Nevertheless, some nearby Francophone provocateur regulars made fun of us by affecting veddy-veddy English accents and indulging in an exercise of épater les têtes carées. They were, in effect, complaining about our use of English on their territory while at the same time trying to get a rise out of us, as it were. (Come to think of it, their mock and highly exaggerated Britishisms included the repeated , “I beg your hard on”.) We laughed, somewhat nervously, and soon thereafter edged out and went on our way.

Still another time, we were at a strip club that featured a guy who had had some kind of hit song about a hockey player. The names of the player and the singer escape me, at the moment.  Whatever song it was, the guy was BAD (and I don’t mean good). His guitar playing was particularly pathetic. When we made our arrogant displeasure too obviously known, he asked if we could do any better. We promptly sent Howie up on the stage to blow him away with his Doc Watson licks! What a triumph! Once, we ventured eastwards in a pack, past the Main (Boulevard St. Laurent), but first we stopped there for “steamés”. Then we ambled our way further to the east and down near St. James Street, as we used to call rue St. Jacques. There we found another strip club where, it was rumoured, there was a one-armed trumpet player who was pretty hot. He was, and he turned out to be Oscar Peterson’s brother. (Have I recounted this story before?)

A particularly hilarious time was had one night when we headed over to the Swiss Hut, not two blocks from Dio, to have a few beers and hamburgers. This was a real dive, with knotty pine booths, loud music, possibly dubious goings on under the table, and the like. It was right next to The Country Palace, where I later saw Bill Munroe’s band play, featuring fiddler wunderkind Richard Greene. We had been told by Jonathan, a former Dio resident who had dropped out and gone into some kind of journalism apprenticeship, that there was a fellow from the BBC who wanted to talk to a number of young people about what was “happening” in those days in Montréal. We met up with him, and he paid for the beers. We gave him a good forty-five minutes of b.s., after which he left and we ordered food. He taped it all, but of course we never heard what he made of what we had said.

We used to go to Ben’s Delicatessen after bar hopping, and would sometimes get questioned and frisked by curious police officers, who seemed to be interested in detecting the possession of purloined draft glasses. Sometimes they did in fact discover, and confiscate, them. Ben’s had photos of various well-known musicians, movie stars, athletes, and politicos scattered throughout the place, which I studied as I carefully eased my way down the stairs to the lavatorial netherworld thereunder. I didn’t know who half of those figures were at the time, but in some cases I figured it out eventually, even many years later. (Hank Mobley is a notable example of someone whose look (and name) intrigued me for some reason, and whom I came eventually to appreciate as the fantastic player that he was.)

In residence, we listened to a lot of music together, whether we were consuming beer, sherry, tea, or coffee with our funky and surreptitiously grilled cheese and onion sandwiches. Early on, it was Gordon Lightfoot, Ian and Sylvia, Dave Brubeck, and Stan Getz, and later we moved on to John Fahey, the Alan Price Set, early Clapton (“In Step”), Bob Dylan (“Highway 61 Revisited”), the Beatles, and, for the sophisticates among us, the Fugs, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, and early George Benson. We were allowed women in our rooms one evening a year, in connection with the College Dance. The German cleaning ladies doubtless looked forward to that, because our rooms were never tidier than on that day. Some of us were in pretty bad shape when we returned from carousing about town, and I learned a number of German curses involving exclamations like “Raus!” and words such as “Schweinestall”. By my recollection, there was really only one occasion on which I myself caused any significant problems for them, other than late rising, and that had to do with one (and the only) time when I suffered difficulties at both ends, as it were, as a result of excessive alcohol consumption. Of course, I suggested to Mrs. Diercks and Mrs. Müller that I must have had the ‘flu.

A couple of my friends moved out of Dio, first renting an apartment down near Loyola College, and later moving to St. Henri close to Atwater. That was a pretty grungy place. We all became expert at cooking beef stroganoff and drinking red wine when we wanted to be sophisticated, while at other times we drank home made and commercial beer. This is also where I discovered hard bop music, and in particular Art Blakey during the Lee Morgan period. There were several good parties there. One involved a joint getting passed around the circle. I took one puff, but Linda gave me such a look that I have never ventured that way again. There was another party, associated with our impending graduation in 1966, so parents were present. It involved a punch that was double the intended strength because lab alcohol had been used and someone miscalculated. We are lucky we survived.

There were also the McGill football games. There was a Lakeshore product, Eric Walter, on the McGill team when I was an undergraduate. He was a great running back.  I enjoyed the games, and particularly the back and forth between us and fans of the other team. And the marching bands were pretty good, even the kilted and bag-piped one from Queen’s.  The guy who waved the big wand at the front of the McGill Marching Band was fun to watch, although the moves of the band generally were far below, say, the Grambling State standard. We had several oh-so-clever crowd chants: the one that I recall readily is “Repulse them, Repulse them, Make them relinquish the ball.” Oh yes, and there were constant calls for cartwheels from the cheerleaders, for perhaps obvious reasons. We were easy to please, really. Going to the football games was all about freedom, school pride, and drinking alcohol al fresco. We tried to smuggle in cases (Molson’s I’m sure), and one time Howie made it through, but we usually had to resort to vodka-riddled oranges instead. If the football game were to end in victory we would take over the streets of Montréal for a short time afterwards, with the wary indulgence of the police force. (We’ll see if the local constabulary in Sackville permit the equivalent if Mount Allison were somehow to defeat Laval this coming Saturday in the national semi-final!) We would then repair to a “Tea Dance” at the Student Union, and there learn which fraternities were having parties that night. One time, we saw a hot group from Toronto at a Tea Dance: I think it might have been Robbie Lane and the Disciples.

The football stadium was actually named Molson Stadium, after Percival Molson, a gentlemanly McGill graduate and star, multi-sport athlete, a Stanley Cup champion in fact, who had served on the McGill Board of Governors at a rather young age. He was killed in France during the First World War. Ironically, the nearby gym was named after Sir Arthur Currie, the Canadian general who is still blamed by some for the deaths in Belgium and France of many Canadians such as Molson.

I should preface what I am about to say with this disclaimer: I was only three years into my teens, and had pretty old-fashioned ideas about certain things. Please bear this in mind before you censure me.

We went to frat parties for the music, the beer, and the girl watching, although I wasn’t so sure about the girls who went to such functions. I was absolutely horrified on one such occasion when I spotted a couple of RVH nursing students that I knew from high school, at one such party. One of them was wiser in her ways than the other, shall we say, and I was sweet on the one I assumed, or rather hoped, was more innocent. I had taken her, the aforementioned Linda, to a dance in Grade Nine, generally yearned after her thereafter, and even unsuccessfully asked her to the Graduation Dance in high school. Although the music of the Rolling Stones was certainly heard that night, “Twist and Shout” (this time by the Beatles, not the Isley Brothers) was the most often played song.  And twisting and shouting was what I wanted to do after dancing with her, and having as soulful a conversation as was possible in the midst of the cacophony. We wended our way up the hill to the nursing residence at RVH, taking the long route through the grounds of the Ravenscrag, otherwise known as the Allan Memorial Institute. There was a particularly beautiful snowfall featuring heavy flakes going on, and although we took our time we arrived at the residence sufficiently early for her to make curfew. If I had been smitten before, I was really gone now.

Linda and I went out a few times that year. I was pretty cheesed off when some older guy from Pte. Claire asked her to the McGill Engineering Dance, which featured Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and I couldn’t go to hear them myself because, well, you know…. In March, Linda surprised me with leather gloves for my birthday, which was around the same time as hers. I gave her some candies and a copy of The Dubliners that I had bought at Eaton’s, or as we eventually came to know it, Eaton. (Be still, my heart, she must have thought!) The next year, we got more serious. She visited me in the hospital while I was laid up for about ten days, having had a major knee operation. I wrote her some French poetry, much of it I think plagiarized. (Question: is it less, or more, reprehensible to plagiarize in pursuit of matters of the heart than in preparing an academic essay?) Although we split up briefly at the beginning of third year, after I had returned from Banff in the late summer of 1964, where she had visited me, we got back together fairly soon thereafter, and the relationship blossomed and intensified.

A word about Banff. The older and more permanent employees at the Banff Springs Hotel did their best to lead us astray. Many of them were hard-drinking and wise-cracking Maritimers. I remember going to a “Purple Jesus Party” in residence that involved drinking out of a garbage pail that had been filled with maybe a dozen different kinds of alcohol in various proportions. I didn’t have too much. It was pretty disgusting. There was a lot of good music after hours. One guy with aspirations to be the next Larry Adler was a talented harmonica player. There was quite a bit of folk music played outdoors, in the woods and on the golf course at night, and there were a number of males seeking to discover and share the secrets of playing guitar just like Buddy Holly, among the employees. I started listening to people like Nancy Wilson and (gulp!) Barbra Streisand, but most of the time we were playing the Beach Boys and the Beatles. When I got home, there was a supposed “Banff Springs reunion” held at one of the frats, but it turned out just to be a gimmick to generate better attendance at the party. I went, and felt really lonely. (No Linda.)

While we were seeking to get back together Linda got invited by a (consequently) former friend to a dance at a frat party, so I took several buses home to Ste. Anne’s and went to one at Macdonald College. (There was actually a provincial bus strike going on, so that made getting home particularly complicated.) The dance at Macdonald featured the fairly impressive local band, JB and the Playboys, but I was miserable. In fact, I almost ended up in blows with one of my brothers that evening because he had been teasing me at the supper table about my evident moroseness. Anyway, all was well with Linda and me, eventually. We went to a lot of movies, some dances, including ones at Dio, and saw both Gordon Lightfoot and Bobby Curtola at the Currie Gym. I’m a bit embarrassed even to this day about having paid money to see Bobby Curtola.  I made up for it by going with a friend to see Ray Charles at Place des Arts, as well as The Rooftop Singers on another occasion. I kept thinking that Linda would have enjoyed them both.

Linda and I got married, on May 6, 1967. Most of my college chums were at the wedding, and several were in the wedding party. We all went out to my parents’ house in Ste. Anne’s for the stag, which was somewhat unconventional. (It involved, for example, singing from The Messiah, which we also used to do, with great hilarity, after supper in the common room at Dio.) The stag also involved attendance by my father, Linda’s father, my Uncle Bill, and Grandpa Tinleg, who had lost his leg in Flanders during World War One. I was presented with a smoking jacket that evening. As I say, it was an unusual stag. I have a reel-to-reel tape of the proceedings. The wedding itself featured a short burst of Wagner to announce that we were getting underway, after an initial period of beautiful extemporizing by my father, who was of course doing organ duty. Dad slid immediately into a march written especially for the occasion, as Linda and her father entered the church.  There was also a wedding motet written for us by my parents, and Dad’s “Bishop’s Jig” concluded the proceedings, after we had signed the register while the father of the groom was, as I recall, playing “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”. All of that is on tape as well.

Linda and I are still married, 55 years since I first set eyes on her. She tolerates all the blues and jazz shows and the art music concerts, and seems genuinely to enjoy the folk ones. Now that I am retired and booting around the house even more than usual, I have decided that, only for her sake of course, I shall have to get some headphones that stick into these little holes that they use these days, to spare her some of what I enjoy and she does not, at least to the same degree.

I and my close friends during the undergraduate days played various instruments, and in particular, organ, piano, guitar, banjo, mandolin, harmonica, spoons, and (pardon the expression) Jew’s harp. The two brothers and I even had a nascent bluegrass group for a short while, and my friend Harold accompanied me on the piano when I foolishly essayed a public playing of “The Swan” after having put the ‘cello down for more than a year. As I have suggested above, we did live a little more dangerously than that would suggest. Apart from the somewhat foolhardy night-time drinking expeditions into the various districts of Montréal, some engaged in flagrant acts of poetry, listened to folk music at the SCM (and alcohol-free) Yellow Door, flirted with student journalism, and engaged in principled and disciplined acts of civil disobedience. As for me, I ended up shunning music, medicine, and law, all originally career possibilities, in favour of sociology. I also shifted my politics leftwards, although confining myself pretty much to electoral politics, and brief anti-war activity during the Cambodia Invasion, when we were in New York City.

After we moved back to Canada, so that I might take up my first full-time academic position, at McMaster University, my drinking habits became somewhat more refined. I switched to scotch, single malt of course. It went better with the newly acquired Volvo and the Robertson pipe and the tweed jacket that I wore with the grey flannel trousers. There were a few long, drawn out drinking sessions at the Faculty Club: the bartender specialized in amazing 13-level pousses-cafés, and the single malt selection was quite impressive, for the times. Certain parties at faculty homes involved vigorous debate, exchanges of conspiracy theories, and fairly vicious gossip, as anyone familiar with academia would expect. The opportunities to practice wordsmithery and engage in arcane debate were legion, the 1970s Golden Triangle equivalent of Marx among the Young Hegelians, I am sure. The same could be said for early Mount Allison days, as well. In recent years, Friday evening gatherings at the University Club have involved at most one scotch before dinner and fairly amusing banter, although when I was an administrator there were on occasion testy exchanges concerning matters on which not all of us agreed.

Most of my circle smoked one thing or another while we were undergraduates. Perhaps I shall close with a few comments about that. I started with cigarettes, and then moved on to pipes, and later cigars. (As I have mentioned, I never got into the funny cigarettes.)

One day, around age 17, on the way back from lunch at the Ste. Anne Sweets, where I remember frequently listening to Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely” on the jukebox, I found a dropped package of Matinées on the sidewalk just outside of Mama Fred’s, where we had first discovered this new thing called pizza.  As I recall, Matinées were generally considered women’s cigarettes. I tried one, and over the next several days nursed the package, which I had secreted about my person. Maybe it took me a week to finish them. Later, I switched to Player’s, which was my father’s brand, and eventually shifted to Rothman’s. In New York, I smoked Winston’s, but gave up cigarettes permanently in early 1970, when we were trying to get pregnant. In fact, I have calculated that # 1 son David’s conception was on the very day that I gave up cigarettes. My brother Richard, by the way, smoked Mark Tens, while they existed. He liked to cash in the coupons. I understand that my brother, Michael, was a secret smoker. I hope that is no longer true. As for my sister, Margot, I think she was an occasional smoker for a time, which was a pattern my mother had followed, favouring Black Russians that were kept on the mantel during Christmas season. My more bohemian undergraduate friends were prone to smoking unfiltered cigarettes, Gitanes or Camels in particular. The rest were partial to Export A, the leading brand of Macdonald Tobacco, the source of much of the funding for Macdonald College, on the campus of which was found our high school, yes, Macdonald High.

I have a long history of association with universities funded by profits from cancer sticks, or “gaspers” as my Grandpa Tinleg had called them since his boyhood. One of Mount Allison University’s most significant benefactors had been CEO of Imperial Tobacco, Canada’s major producer of cigarettes, although by the time he arrived at that company it had diversified and transmogrified itself into Imasco, short for Imperial and Associates, Company, now owned by British American Tobacco. (Several other high-profile Allisonians can also be linked to Imperial Tobacco.)

I still occasionally wake up from a mild nightmare that involves my realizing that I had been smoking in the dream. Other Freudian interpretations to the contrary, I believe that this relates to my worrying that I might relapse, more than 30 years after I had given up the filthy habit entirely. As an ex-smoker, and someone whose father died of lung cancer at 55, thus robbing us of more time with him and the world of more of his music, I am troubled when friends or relatives smoke, and am absolutely horrified when I see young people partaking. I am afraid that I have occasionally been heard to make snarky comments to third parties whenever said young people reveal themselves to be vegetarians or vegans, and wonder whether they are so for ethical rather than health reasons. I do not do this within their hearing, however, as I rather suspect that they would not appreciate the old fart’s sense of irony.

My Dad actually gave me a pipe when it looked like I was going to be a smoker. Perhaps he was trying to steer me away from cigarettes. The first day I tried a pipe, using a very mild tobacco, I got so woozy that I had to lie on the couch upstairs while the rest of the family watched television together in the basement. I think I went to bed early that night, vowing not to inhale the next time. Later on, in my late New York City, Hamilton, and early Sackville days, I switched pretty much exclusively to the pipe, with but occasional forays into cigar smoking. I had special lighters, tampers, holsters, and more than a dozen pipes of various types. My pipe smoking involved heavily aromatic stuff like Erinmore at times, but eventually I settled on various Scandinavian brands (usually with Scottish names), which were somewhat milder and more affordable. When Linda was pregnant with David in 1970, I was still smoking Erinmore: she would return from work after I had fouled the air in the apartment all evening while slogging through the latest Frankfurt School tome, and she would promptly throw up. We would joke that she was suffering from “evening sickness”. Eventually, we figured things out, and I tried to confine the pipe smoking to places outside of the apartment. I gave up smoking entirely in 1980, by a sheer act of will, for health reasons, yes, but also out of disgust that I had become so entangled in the equipment and preparation techniques that are so much a part of pipe culture.

Oh, and just so you know, although perhaps it is obvious by now, I have virtually nothing left to hide.

Berkeley Fleming

Sackville, N.B.

Stardust Memories

There is, I suspect, general agreement that the Bix-Beiderbecke-reminiscent “Stardust” by Hoagy Carmichael is a particularly beautiful song. It is certainly one of the most performed and recorded American Standards, with or without lyrics. There have in fact been more than 1,500 versions of this composition recorded since it first emerged as an instrumental in 1927, and with lyrics by Mitchell Parish in 1929.

What I am raising today is the matter of which are the best of the many versions of “Stardust” that I have encountered over the years. Identified for your consideration are ten great instrumentals and six splendid vocals.

The instrumental versions are by Louis Armstrong, Errol Garner, Coleman Hawkins, Wynton Marsalis, Django Reinhardt, Arty Shaw (with Billy Butterfield and Jack Jenney), Art Tatum, Clark Terry, Toots Thielemans, and Ben Webster. The singers’ versions that I have isolated for your consideration are by Hoagy Carmichael himself, Nat “King” Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Helen Humes, Frank Sinatra, and Mel Tormé.

I present below links to the various contenders in each category, listed in alphabetical order; single out a runner-up in each category; and present an embedded video clip of the winner in each category.

Although I certainly welcome additional nominations in both categories, and obviously there are many great, recorded versions that are not available on the web, including a number by some of these same individuals, I am afraid that it is going to be very difficult to convince me that anyone tops Mel Tormé.  His rendition is astonishing, exquisite, even sublime.

Instrumentals

Louis Armstrong (includes a vocal)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIE6U6Lrtrc

Chet Atkins and Stanley Jordan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PcFTHsi9eI

Erroll Garner

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivm9yUxT86k

Stéphane Grappelli

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaGobcJLjqQ

Django Reinhardt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niDdvJimRWI

Art Tatum

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtnJznCB2vo

Toots Thielemans

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNMvbfIOYw4

Lester Young

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMBsiF25KG8

First runner-up is a version by Ben Webster.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_GfWfgytLI

And the winner, notwithstanding the poor quality of the video itself, is Clark Terry’s performance (in Jazz at the Philharmonic, London, England, 1967).

Vocals

Hoagy Carmichael

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2fbOAyNOpM

Ella Fitzgerald

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp5uBTsaURI

Helen Humes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DKoex9hCFk

Frank Sinatra

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z-nzIUcVAA

The first runner-up is Nat King Cole’s classic rendition.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–XCPVIDeVs

And the winner for best vocal rendition is the one by Mel Tormé (at the Fujitsu Concord Jazz Festival, Japan, 1990).

Berkeley Fleming

Sackville, N.B.

Whose Lick Is It, Anyway?

This entry is on giving credit where credit is due, as Samuel Adams apparently admonished us in 1777. I begin with a brief excursus on giving credit, from the point of view of a retired academic who spent some 60 years learning and then insisting on the importance of citing one’s sources. I also stressed that tracing useful ideas back as far as one can, with the object of reading and considering the original source if at all possible, allows one then legitimately to cite that source as one’s own. I use two examples from the area of social thought, before turning to a small matter relating to attributing originality appropriately in the realm of music.

My official watchword is “la pessimisme de l’intelligence, l’optimisme de la volonté.” (Honest. I have put it into course handouts and used it in political commentaries for many years, and it’s even in my Profile on Facebook!) This maxim is usually translated as “pessimism of the intelligence (or intellect), optimism of the will”. It is often credited to the Marxist political theorist Antonio Gramsci. This drives me crazy.  The quotation is from dramatist, novelist, music critic/historian, and pacifist/mystic, Romain Rolland. That is not to say that Rolland invented the argument, but the felicitous phrasing is certainly his. Gramsci borrowed it, you see.  Gramsci also had the grace to acknowledge that his source was Rolland. Since then, dozens, scores, likely hundreds of people have missed that, either because they never read Gramsci themselves, relying instead on a secondary source, and therefore never considered the possibility of exploring Rolland’s own argument, or because they have just forgotten.

In class, I would expound at length on the meaning of this quotation to me. In social theory discussions, I would link Rolland’s maxim to Max Weber’s arguments in “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation”, sometimes alluding to Emile Durkheim’s seeming social determinism and even Sigmund Freud’s reality principle. In fourth year seminars, I would expand on those ideas, and discuss similar arguments in the work of the Weber-influenced Freudian Marxist, Jürgen Habermas. In papers presented at learned conferences, I would use Rolland’s suggestive saying to illuminate the Epictetic Stoic strain in the arguments of Karl Polányi in the closing pages of The Great Transformation.

In political discussions, I have reacted, in the spirit of Rolland, to the well-known last public words of Jack Layton by suggesting that love, hope, and optimism may well be necessary , but they are not sufficient, conditions for changing the world for the better. We also need sober, honest, even cold-blooded analysis of what is possible (pessimism of the intelligence), as well as thorough and unconstrained discussion of what can and should be done, and concerted and collective democratic action in pursuit of that on which we are agreed. Heart, meet mind. Then, and only then, action.

Here’s another example of a misattributed insight.  This one has to do directly with acknowledging the cumulative and collective enterprise of seeking and sharing knowledge. Isaac Newton is well-known, certainly among scientists, historians of science, historians of ideas, sociologists of knowledge, and intellectual biographers, to have said (in a 1676 letter to Robert Hooke), “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”  There is some question as to whether Newton was thereby honouring the scholarly ­­­­folkway of intellectual modesty or was actually mocking Hooke, his apparently hunch-backed rival in the field of optics. Nowadays, using Google Search, one can easily discover that the memorable expression “on the shoulders of giants” can be traced back, at least according to John of Salisbury, to the twelfth-century, neo-Platonist scholar, Bernard of Chartres (not to be confused with the Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux, condemner of Abelard, or with the Benedictine Bernard of Cluny, both also from the twelfth century). Interestingly, “Stand on the Shoulders of Giants” is the official slogan of Google Scholar.

I myself learned about the Bernard of Chartres claim to originality the old-fashioned way, by going to the library, or rather to the bookstore. Back in the late 1960s, I read and delighted in an entertaining yet (actually, because) scholarly tour de force that displayed the full powers of witty digression of a favourite American sociologist, Robert K. Merton, in On the Shoulder of Giants: A Shandean Postcript (1965).  Merton was a most through scholar with a flair for making sociology sound interesting, an attribute that he shared with some others of his generation but very few possess today. That he was able to conceive and pull off this particular intellectual conceit is a tribute to Merton’s qualities of mind and writing skill, to be sure. However, it can also be linked to his having, as a senior faculty member at Columbia University in the mid-twentieth century, a well-organized, thoroughly competent, and full-time secretary exclusively at his disposal, or so I have been given to understand.

 These extended comments on misattribution of originality might strike the reader as absolutely fascinating, or perhaps agonizingly pedantic, but, either way, what’s it got to do with music? Now that I have briefly succumbed to, perhaps even over-indulged in, irresistible digressive impulses, I have appropriately circumscribed ambitions. I wish simply to make the case that a certain guitar lick often credited to Chuck Berry was most likely invented by T-Bone Walker.

Aaron Thibeaux “T-Bone” Walker had a massive influence on the development of blues of the Texas, Chicago, West Coast, and “jump” varieties, and a tremendous, if not always recognized, impact on rock guitar, as well. T-Bone is perhaps best known for his song, “Call it Stormy Monday”. He essentially invented the single-note horn-like soloing approach to blues guitar. His playing is a beautiful amalgam of flawless tone, effortless note bending, melodic creativity, fluid phrasing, and tasty vibrato, all infused with a blues sensibility.

I have heard the particular T-Bone lick which I am highlighting in early pieces by Muddy Waters, Elmore James, and B.B. King. Duke Robillard, who is perhaps the greatest of the current exponents of the T-Bone Walker style, of course uses it frequently. Many aspiring guitarists since the mid-1950s, when Chuck Berry first emerged into the mass public consciousness, have tried the lick out in their basements, rec rooms, or garages, have played it at high school dances or in local bars, and doubtless believe that it came from Chuck Berry. All honour to Chuck Berry for this and other contributions, but we should recognize that he borrowed the lick from T-Bone Walker, directly or indirectly. I have no doubt that most, if not all, of Freddy King, Albert King, Albert Collins, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Lowell Fulson, Buddy Guy, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Winter, and Stevie Ray Vaughan recognized the Walker provenance of this and other licks from the beginning. Others, such as Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Mike Bloomfield, Duane Allman, Billy Gibbons, and Angus Young recognized that eventually, as I came to do as well, and some perhaps from the very beginning of their interest in the guitar. For the general public, however, the T-Bone lick in question is still what I used to call “that Chuck Berry thing”.

T-Bone’s “I Got a Break Baby” was recorded on July 20, 1942. It was I believe the first recorded use of the stuttered phrase/”riff”/”lick” usually credited to Chuck Berry, who has himself acknowledged the influence of Walker on his various characteristic riffs and his particular brand of showmanship. Walker also used the lick in the better known but less interesting “Mean Old World”, recorded the same day, and continued to use the lick throughout his career. When I first heard T-Bone play these songs, after having purchased a tremendous Mosaic Records box set of his recordings from 1940 to 1954, and when I realized how early they had been recorded, I was amazed. In my prior innocence, I had, like others, thought that Chuck Berry had made this distinctive lick up himself.

“I Got a Break Baby” and “Mean Old World” were actually the fourth and five sides ever recorded by T-Bone, and the first two on which he was clearly playing the guitar. The first two T-Bone recordings, made in 1929 when he was 19, were of him not as a guitarist but as a Leroy Carr influenced singer billed as “Oak Cliff T-Bone”. The third recording, “T-Bone Blues”, came from a 1940 Les Hite session and also featured T-Bone as a singer rather than a guitarist, with “Hawaiian” guitar backing provided by Frank Pasley.  It is conceivable that the single note playing that occurs for a few seconds on this number is by Walker, but I suspect not.

Chuck Berry might well have heard the lick early in his formative period. He would have been almost 16 when the two 1942 pieces were recorded. I shall leave it to Chuck Berry scholars to discover whether he picked it up from listening to T-Bone directly, or, if not, who might have introduced him to it.  It would be interesting to learn when he actually began to use this device himself, as well. My review of his own initial recordings has led to the identification of a brief, revved-up version of the lick in his first hit, “Maybellene”, among the first recordings that Berry completed in 1955. It can also be heard in many other pieces, and in particularly dramatic fashion in “Johnny Be Good” (1958).

I suggest that readers listen to Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene”, paying special attention to 1:09-1:14 in the YouTube audio clip below, and follow that by listening to “I Got a Break Baby”, especially 0:46-0:49, and “Mean Old World”, from 0:28-0:30.

“Maybellene” (Chuck Berry, 1955)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75RiHJGfyUE

esp. 1:09-1:14

“I Got a Break Baby” (T-Bone Walker, 1942)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mxLFYpkMFo

esp. 0:46-0:49

”Mean Old World” (T-Bone Walker, 1942)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSOYOFQgVMs

esp. 0:28-30

In his contribution to the liner notes for the Mosaic box set, Billy Vera makes this subtle comment on “Sail on Boogie” (which he calls “Sail on Blues”), recorded by Walker in 1945: “[W]e hear Chuck Berry licks a full ten years before Chuck Berry’s first record.” If we accept the typical argument that Berry started recording in 1955, although I have seen claims of some recordings in 1953, and if we focus only on the particular lick on which I am concentrating, Walker first used it in the two recordings in 1942, and Berry didn’t until “Maybellene” in 1955, so that’s 13 years. No matter: the point is – and this needs to be hammered at rather than being slyly alluded to – this a T-Bone lick, not a Chuck Berry one, and that goes more generally, as well.

Somewhat more cautiously, I might say this. It is clear that T-Bone did not get the lick from Chuck. It is very likely that Chuck got it from T-Bone. It is also conceivable, but not very likely, that both Chuck and T-Bone derived it from someone else. Perhaps there is a guitar nerd or musicologist out there who could weigh in on this more definitively? If there were an earlier inventor of the lick, I suppose it would likely be Blind Lemon Jefferson, who was a friend of T-Bone’s parents, and for whom T-Bone worked as a seeing-eye-guide in Dallas from the age of eight. For the life of me, however, I can hear no evidence of this lick, and not much of anything else that is characteristically T-Bone’s, in those of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s recordings to which I have listened. Other possibilities would be the teacher that T-Bone had in common with jazz single-note guitar soloist Charlie Christian, Chuck Richardson; or Lonnie Johnson; or even Lead Belly, but again, I don’t hear it. I have not listened to Richardson or Johnson, at all. I suspect there are no Richardson recordings extant. Now there’s a research project for a few long winter nights.

Justin Sandercoe, in a site that used to include a separate section on T-Bone’s characteristic licks, and even provided transcriptions of them, states baldly that Chuck “nicked” most of his guitar tricks from T-Bone.  The current version of that site seems no longer to include this material, and I have not been able to find any other transcription of the lick. It is worth investigating this site for other reasons, however.

http://www.justinguitar.com/

Of course, we could ask Chuck himself about all of this, and perhaps someone has. I have seen no direct and detailed discussion of the matter with him, although he has made no secret of the general influence of T-Bone on both his riffs and his showmanship tricks. For example, at the 1987 induction of T-Bone Walker into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Chuck Berry is reported to have said the following to Walker’s daughter: “All the things that people see me do on the stage, I got that from your daddy.”

Now, let’s talk about Chuck’s “duck walk”. Oh, wait, that’s T-Bone’s too.  T-Bone also played with his teeth before Chuck (and well before Jimi, of course), behind his head before Stevie Ray (but after Charley Patton), and behind his back (but also after Patton). Don’t get me wrong. I love Chuck Berry. His lyrics, their resonance with middle-class (white) teenagers’ experience, his humour, his energy, his showmanship, and his implied and his more outright lasciviousness, all did a great deal for rock’n’roll and for me personally in my teens and twenties.

There are several somewhat useful entries on T-Bone’s licks on the web, and evidently there are plenty of books on his work as well. You Tube provides a number of demo videos of interest.  One relates directly to our lick. Check out this instructional video by Jack mayeaux (sic), and pay special attention to what he does at 1:32-1:35, 5:54-6:19, 6:37-6:39, and 7:43-46.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70_fV2A10MQ

Now we know not only whose lick it is, and how it sounds, but we can also see how it is done. I think I’ll try it on the old Mandoblaster.

Berkeley Fleming

Sackville, N.B.