Boogie, Pete & The Senator: Canadian Musicians in Jazz: The Eighties by Mark Miller (review)

HUMANITms 213 uniform footnoting and bibliographic convention might have been adopted, since an article must lose some of its autonomy when it takes its place in a book. At the very least Sing Out the Glad News increases our awareness of a vernacular body of music that, far more than many a forgotten cantata or orchestralsuite, tells us a great deal about who we really are, and we must join with John Beckwith in urging that perceptual process of rediscovery which alone can render the ongoing searchfor national identity meaningful and fruitful. 'We have lately stopped tearing down our old buildings,' the editor concludes. 'Could we also stop throwing away our old hymn tunes?' (ALAN M. GILLMOR) Mark Miller. Boogie, Petef,i The Senator: Canadian Musicians in Jazz: The Eighties. Nightwood Editions. 312. $16.95 paper It is hard to argue with Mark Miller's basic premise that the story of jazzin Canada is better told by examining the lives of the unique individuals who play jazz than by examining the music itself. Miller has also expressed the hope that a Canadian as distinct from an American jazz tradition will develop. Millers hopes notwithstanding, this is unlikely to happen if the music continues to draw on its vital Afro-American roots. If it is cut off from those roots, it may, as it already has with some players in Europe and Quebec, become only jazz-influenced 'improvised music.' In his pioneering work Jazz in Canad~: Fourteen Lives (1982), Miller sought to reveal something of the lives of those who have chosen to be jazz musicians in Canada, covering the period from the 1930S to about 1980. Miller's purpose required that he concentrate not on profiling the most popular or widely recognized figures in Canadian jazzbut on telling the stories, often in the musicians' own words, of those who have laboured at their art in relative obscurity. In his new book, Boogie, Pete & The Senator (the names in the title selected more for colour than implied importance), Miller has expanded the- scope of his investigation and brought it up to date while only slightly blurring his own subtle distinction between those Canadians who play jazz and those who are jazz musicians. The latter are identified by their stronger personal commitment to jazz, a commitment that often invites personal hardship and meagre financial rewards. Although it is tempting to quibble over the inclusion or exclusion of particular musicians in the present survey, the profiling of forty musicians (four are hold-overs from the earlier volume) and the passing reference to many more provide an admirably comprehensive picture of the varied personalities who are actively contributing to the Canadian jazz scene. Miller's judgment of relative musical importance or his 214 LETTERS IN CANADA 19B7 interest in the player as character is implied by the space devoted to each: VicVogel, Paul Bley, Phil Nimmons, Oscar Peterson, and Rob McConnell get the most attention. The inclusion of Bley, long an expatriate, reflects Miller's obvious affection for those working on the outer edges of the music's evolving tradition, as does his interest in the alphabet soup of 'new music' formations (ACMA, CCMC, NOW), including the Quebecois musicians of ENIM/Plateau Mont Royal. Another stylistic extreme is examined in a short piece on Kid Bastien - not, as might be expected, a New Orleans creole but a British immigrant who plays rudimentary Dixieland in Toronto. Canadian jazz musicians have amazingly diverse geographic origins, and Miller gives a brief outline of activity in communities from coast to coast; however, playing jazz is essentially a collaborative endeavour and those who would grow artistically must seek out ever more accomplished collaborators who will both support and challenge them. Not surprisingly , almost thirty of the musicians profiled are located in either Toronto or Montreal. Seven are associated with Vancouver while most of the rest are expatriates. Mark Miller is probably the only writer who makes most of his living covering the Canadian jazz scene. A writer-photographer for the Globe and Mail, he has had the rare opportunity to hear the music as it is performed in night clubs and on concert stages across the country. Fortunately he is...