Swinging in Paradise: The Story of Jazz in Montreal by John Gilmore (review)

244 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 instead as a period of absence from Canada. Is this an attempt to set the international artist in a national context - an attempt to appropriate him as a Canadian by virtue of his 'exile'? Is this necessary? Perhaps not. As Dompierre clearly establishes, Lyman's contribution to Canadian art is substantial in any case, and, in fact, his European experience, as it made itself felt in his art and in his ideas, was something that lay at the very heart of that contribution. (LYNDA JESSUP) John Gilmore. Swinging in Paradise: The Story ofJazz in Montreal Vehicule Press. 322. $16.95 paper Jazz as a distinct form of musical expression began to emerge from its folk and popular antecedents around the turn of the century, but throughout most ofits history it has had to depend for its very survival on the popular entertainment industry. Jazz has flourished at those times and in those places where night-life has been most exuberant and unrestrained - New Orleans before 1917, Chicago in the 1920S, Kansas City in the 1930S. Montreal was a thriving entertainment centre from the early years of this century; the city's night-life became especially active during Prohibition when gangsters moved into the city and established it as the centre for liquor-smuggling operations into less fortunate parts of the continent. Flush with cash, the gangsters also took an interest in the local entertainment industry, including such ancillary enterprises as prostitution, narcotics, and gambling. The results may not have been socially beneficial, but night-life boomed, and over the years thousands of entertainers and musicians found work in the city's many burlesque and vaudeville theatres, dancehalls, cabarets, and nightclubs. However, after World War II, live entertainment and the businesses which fostered it were under pressure from rising costs, television, and changing public tastes and attitudes. The boom period finally came to a close in the mid-1950s with the election as mayor of the anti-vice crusader Jean Drapeau. John Gilmore has skilfully combined what documentary evidence was generally available with information, insights, and memorabilia gleaned from extensive personal interviews. He has created an amazingly comprehensive and highly readable portrait of the Montreal jazz community as it struggled to survive and nourish itself as a part of the city's night-life subculture. In his several years of pioneering research, Gilmore turned up so much valuable material that a companion volume, Who's Who of Jazz in Montreal: Ragtime to 1970, will be published soon, and a special collection has been established in the Concordia University Archives. Jazz is an evanescent art which can only be captured if the moment is HUMANITIES 245 preserved; recordings are the principal repositories of jazz musical history. In the absence of enough truly representative recordings of jazz as it was played in Montreal, Gilmore has chosen to concentrate on the social, political, and economic forces which governed the lives of professional musicians who sought in the playing of jazz more artistic fulfilment than their regular jobs usually provided. Few of the many talented musicians who lived and played jazz in Montreal ever received much notice at home or elsewhere; most practised their art in relative obscurity. It is their lives Gilmore seeks to illuminate. While the best-known products of the Montreal jazz scene - Oscar Peterson, Maynard Ferguson, and Paul BIey - are not ignored, Gilmore discusses them mainly in terms of their activities while resident in Montreal as part of the local jazz community. Afro-Americans have always been of central importance to the development ofjazz, and Gilmore believes thatjazz in the authentic sense was not performed in Montreal until the arrival of black musicians from the United States around 1920; despite racial barriers, blacks, such as the Canadians Myron Sutton, Steep Wade, and Nelson Symonds, along with many American expatriates, continued to make significant contributions to the Montreal music scene. Gilmore's study also adds important details to the recorded history of Montreal's black community. Jazz is a group activity, and Montreal was unique for the collaborations and tensions between the musicians who played together - anglophones and francophones, blacks, Asians, and whites, Canadians, Americans, and Europeans...