As my second career as a jazz musician cooked along into the early 1990s, I was really keen to work gigs at the Montreal Bistro. The club was geographically off the beaten path, on Sherbourne Street a couple of blocks south of Queen, which put it in a corner of downtown Toronto that was isolated after dark. But all my local jazz musician friends worked there, and they loved the place.
A married couple named Lothar and Brigitte Lang ran the club, both of them jazz fans who were musician-friendly in the way they presented the groups they booked. People responded to the club and the musicians who played there, and the Montreal Bistro seemed to be a success. The only negative thing as far as I was concerned was that Lother and Brigitte never booked me.
The problem, unknown to me, was that the Langs thought I was a New York piano player, which I guess I was in some interpretations, and that I lived in New York City, which I hadn't for decades. The Montreal Bistro featured American musicians from time to time, but it wasn't a set policy of theirs. Apparently the Lang definition of "American musician" covered me. Then, finally, I was hired for a week's gig with a trio in 1991. But as I discovered when I walked into the club on the first night of my first booking, the Langs were still under a misapprehension about my home. They continued to think I was a New Yorker and had just flown up from the Big Apple.
"When did you get in?" Brigitte asked me.
"Nineteen seventy-two," I said.
That first week, I fell in love with the place. For one thing, it had a warmer feel than most nightclubs. But the best thing of all was that the club set a high standard in appreciation for the music. At the beginning of every set, an announcement was made asking the patrons to "Please respect the musicians and be quiet during the set." That repeated announcement trained the audiences, and everybody actually shut up. In fact, it seemed clear to me that the Montreal Bistro's standard for audience behaviour had a carryover effect. Toronto audiences learned that jazz musicians deserved to be listened to no matter where they played, and other jazz clubs in the city attracted people who kept their chatter to a muted minimum during sets just the way they did at the Montreal Bistro.
Gene and Dave Young exploring Ellington and Strayhorn.
After my debut week at the bistro, I appeared regularly until the club closed in the summer of 2006. During that stretch, I cut two live records during gigs there. The first, which was released on Candid, took place over a couple of days in October 1993 in a trio with Dave Young and Terry Clarke. On the record, it must have become apparent to listeners, if they hadn't realized it much earlier, that I had a deep affection for the obscure but gorgeous songs of well known composers. All of this was the result not just of my love for the Great American Songbook but of the study of the composers and all their works that I did for CBC radio. That, plus all the interesting musical situations I'd been involved in as an accompanist, gave me a formidable store of songs that I could draw on.
For example, in the March 1993 studio album I recorded with Dave and Terry, I included a song called Right As The Rain. It was a song by the master, Harold Arlen, from his Broadway musical, Bloomer Girl. I knew the tune because I'd played it every night for a week during the auditions for the movie version of Bloomer Girl that never got made. Another rarely heard song, also on that studio recording, was the Rodgers and Hammerstein tune from South Pacific called A Cockeyed Optimist. I learned that one when I accompanied Mitizi Gaynor on her nightclub tour. Mitizi was keen on the song because, of course, she sang it as the lead female character, Nellie Forbush, in the movie version of South Pacific.
In coincidental ways like this, good songs have the chance to stick around, and I included one more of those on my first live album from the Bistro. This was a nice little number called Happy Harvest. Harry Warren wrote it, with lyrics by Mack Gordon, for a 1950 movie musical called Summer Stock starring Gene Kelly and Judy Garland. Those are are pretty decent credentials for a little known song. Also on that album was a number with strictly personal credentials; it was called A Tune For Mac, and I wrote it for my grandson, my daughter Denise's boy.
The second album I recorded live at the Montreal Bistro came a few years later in April of 2002. It was a duo album, me and Dave Young, and the songs were from just two composers, Duke Ellington and his right hand man Billy Strayhorn. Dave and I played the entire last week of April, including the evening of the 29th. That date had much significance since it happened to mark Duke's birthday. If he'd been still living, he would have turned 103 on that day.
Baldwin Street Music was the name of the company I recorded the album for, a label owned by a remarkable guy named Ted Ono. Ted grew up in a well-to-do family in Japan, the son of parents who must have been pretty hip. Whenever the great Teddy Wilson visited Japan, he stayed in the Ono house, and his gift to the family was a few free piano lessons for young Ted. Ted eventually made his way to New York City where he showed another artistic talent by dancing and acting in a handful of Broadway shows.
Later he moved to Toronto, and among other enterprises he started Baldwin Street Music. Ted loved singers like Lee Wiley, Teddi King and Dinah Washington, and he bought the rights to reissue their earlier work from the singers' original recording companies. If there was one thing in the world that really bugged Ted, it was the European record companies that bootlegged the old recordings of the singers from Ted's label, never paying him a penny. Ted was honourable about such dealings; the European companies were not.
The album I cut for Ted brought me back to the two men I adored as composers and as friends. Duke and Billy, as people who loved their music were well aware, possessed musical minds that ran along almost identical, lines. One of them could start writing a song and the other could finish it, and nobody could tell who wrote which part.
One illustration of their uncanny collaborations came on a 1966 album called the Far East Suite. In the album's songs, Duke caught in music the flavour of places where the Ellington band stopped during an extensive 1963 tour into Asia and beyond. The band passed through such exotic locales as Beirut and Mumbai and Kabul (more accurately. the album probably should have been named the Near East Suite). One of the album's songs, Agra, described in music the Taj Mahal. But Duke himself never got to the Taj Mahal on the tour. He sent Billy instead, and Billy described the look and feel of the place so vividly that Duke translated Billy's description into the luxurious Agra.
On my live album at the Montreal Bistro, I included one tune from the Far East Suite. It was Isfahan, and it was mostly Billy's piece. In fact, Billy wrote the song a year or two before the Ellington band tour of 1963. He named the song Elf, but Duke reworked it for the album, gving it a brand new name. Under Isfahan, it became a popular tune for jazz musicians to generally stretch out on. That was what Dave Young and I did happily.
The two of us played Billy's Raincheck and Duke's Morning Glory, Billy's Passion Flower and Duke's I'm Beginning to See the Light. We played Lady Mac which both of them worked on as part of the album titled Such Sweet Thunder, Duke's salute to the Shakespearian Festival in Stratford, Ontario.
Tomorrow Mountain was a lovely Duke piece that went back to my days with Lena when she used to sing it. An experienced lyricist named John La Touche wrote the words (among hundreds of other songs, La Touche put the lyrics to Vernon Duke's Taking a Chance on Love), and when Lena sang the song at the Sands, the band's lead trumpet was so moved by the beauty of her version that he broke into tears.
I included on my album several Ellington songs that weren't especially well known. Cop Out was one of those, and so was Single Petal of a Rose, which went all the way back to the 1950s, part of Duke's Queen's Suite in honour of Elizabeth the Second.
At the Montreal Bistro, I explained the songs' background to the audience rather in the style that I had worked out years earlier in my CBC radio gigs. Ted Ono kept the tape running through every set, recording the music and explanations and the whole works. He included much of the conversation on the album when he released it. I would have preferred that he stick strictly to the music. But Ted thought people would benefit from my talk about Duke and Billy for years to come. He might have been right, but for myself, the deepest pleasure came from playing the songs by two men whose mutual sense of beauty taught me so much about the creation of music that could endure in its loveliness.