Jazz in Canada: Fourteen Lives by Mark Miller (review)

206 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 Ultimately, Gould's is a case of work being inseparable from personality. Probably nobody will ever disentangle all the contradictions in his character and the inconsistencies in his musical utterances. Many will try, and some, like Friedrich, will help us on the way to a better understanding . Far from failing, Friedrich's biography for years will remain the standard text about Gould's life, as Payzant's will remain the pioneer exploration of his musicianship and aesthetics. Each opens doors to further examination and insight. Literary people will continue to delight in the complexities of character and intellect, music lovers in the richness of imagination and accomplishment synonymous with Glenn Gould. (HELMUT KALLMANN) Mark Miller. Jazz in Canada: Fourteen Lives Nightwood Editions 1988. 244· $16.95 paper Mark Miller's Jazz in Canada is, hands down, the most important book on the topic. When it first appeared in 1982 under the imprint of University of Toronto Press, it had the rare impact of a book that not only limns its subject but invents it. Until then, it was easy for Canadian writers about jazz to see ourselves as interlopers in an essentially American cultural phenomenon. Most Canadian jazz musicians saw themselves as adjuncts .of American movements such as bebop, fusion, free jazz, or (Rob McConnell's term) 'big-band swing.' The branch-plant mentality implied nothing about the quality of our writing and playing, of course. Both were sometimes as good here, we recognized, as in the Ur-heimat. Then Miller came along and showed us that jazz had roots here, that the Montreal jazz culture was distinct from the Toronto one, and that neither one owed its being to New York or took its definition from it. He showed us not by proclamations and reasoned arguments but by the simpler, and ultimately more convincing, method of interviewing the indigenes. In their own words, and in Miller's biographical frame for the words, the fourteen musicians provide a cumulative record, a kind of casual history of their indigenousness. The hardcover edition of Jazz in Canada had a small printing and disappeared quickly. (A few years ago, a copy in a Toronto used-book store cost more than its new price.) This paperback edition from Nightwood Editions, a small Toronto firm run by sometime bassist David Lee, restores it to print using the tasteful original plates. Miller, a freelance writer who reports on jazz regularly in the Globe and Mail, has since published two books as Nightwood paperbacks: Boogie, Pete and the Senator (1987) is a broader survey of Canadian jazz with interviews of forty-odd musicians, and Cool Blues: Charles Parker in Montreal and Toronto in 1953 (1990) scrutinizes Canada's principal jazz cities as momentary hosts of one of the music's greatest players. HUMANITIES 207 The oldest of Miller's subjects in Jazz in Canada are Trump Davidson, who died atseventyin 1978, and his brotherTeddy, who spoke for both of them but has since died (in 1983). The youngest are Brian Barley and Ron Park, saxophonists who died in their twenties in 1971. For some of the survivors, the six-year interval between editions has made a difference. P.J. Perry, who apprenticed in his father Paul's prairie dance band as did another subject, trumpeter Herbie Spanier, wondered aloud if he would survive his 'unsavoury' habits, and he has. Spanier, whose braggadocio makes an unforgettable chapter, has seldom appeared in jazzclubs since, and Sonny Greenwich, known equally as a guitarist and a recluse, has played publicly with some regularity in Montreal as well as releasing at least two records. Montrealers Nelson Symonds and Guy Nadon, a guitarist and a drummer virtually unknown beyond the city when Miller singled them out, are now sought out by every jazz fan who visits. The other principals are pianists Chris Gage (1927-64) and Wray Downes, and drummers Larry Dubin (1931-78) and Claude Ranger. Miller chose these fourteen people not only because they spanned the history and covered the geography of Canadian jazz. Their representativeness goes beyond that. Most ofall, theyhave the spiritthat is essential to jazz but so elusive to its writers. Miller lets...