autobiography

 

 

I was born June 28, 1962 in the Catherine Booth hospital. I was born with the ambilical cord around my neck and Dr. Phylls breathed into my lungs my first breath of life. It was a Thursday at exactly 1pm. I almost missed my cue. My early childhood seemed blessed and sometimes idyllic. I had the best toys and today many would be worth thousands. I was a moody kid and was mesmerized by talent with a creativity of my own to match it. My father honed me on a steady diet of Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson but we both really enjoyed us some Horace Silver.  My mother was a country girl who jitterbugged to Glenn Miller in her teens but was still very much a country girl who gave me my love of Johnny Cash and the Carter Family. She was also president of the Montreal Chapter for the Sonny James fan club. There was a lot of jazz and country in the house. My first act of rebellion was to shun it all secretly for Beethoven. I had enough Charlie Brown books read to me to know that Ludwig was a heavy cat.

 

Birthdays and Christmas were special times and there were lots of people around during these occasions as I grew up in a very diverse extended family.  I had an uncle Francois Labranche and an auntie Lorraine Daigle. My auntie Lorraine was also very fond of music and through her I found a heart for Edith Piaf and my first genuine crush on Mireille Mathieu. My uncle Herman and aunt Marg were actually my dad's aunt and uncle but I was never raised to call them "great" and who knows why? comedy, spite or respect, pick one.

 

In 1967 Montreal was the place to be during Canada's Centennial with Expo '67 being the centerpiece of  the celebrations. My father had gigs with Charlie Biddle that year and Charlie was bringing jazz to the "Children's Pavillion" at "Man and his World" and little did we know this would be the seed of the Montreal Jazz Festival later.  I think I saw my father play for the first time that year. I got to stay up a little later and just remember thinking how cool it was to be a musician. The only thing I knew at the time was Legos and Dr. Seuss. Oh, and don't forget Charlie Brown through whom I met Schroeder and was forever changed by the music of Beethoven, although I had developed a real soft spot for Chopin.

 

I did study with Oscar Peterson's sister Daisy Sweeney who, incidentally, is also the mother of Canadian Olympian and CBC journalist Sylvia Sweeney. I was in very good company. Oscar's brother Chuck was my godfather as well. I passed 6 grades of piano with exams at McGill University.  With another 6 grades I could begin to study for the concert stage. I knew what I wanted to do with my life and for the rest of my life. Just because you study with Daisy doesn't mean you're going to come out sounding like Oscar or Oliver Jones or Joe Sealy and certainly not your father. Instead I was going to be the "legitimate" artist.

 

My father took me to see Oscar Peterson when I was about 6 years old. I was very excited. When the trio came onstage Oscar didn't have Ed Thigpen or Ray Brown, He had Louis Hayes and Sam Jones!! I didn't want to see that! I was disappointed, my world was askew and I was ready to sulk. Of course we had some of the new trio records but I was firmly listening to Ray and Ed's swing and already working on my second copy of "Canadiana Suite". I was a little moody for about the first 29 seconds of the show then Oscar sunk in and it was the greatest event I had ever seen. That's a hard thing to shake.  What else was hard to shake was being backstage with my dad and there's Oscar, my "uncle pete" as I had been calling him since I could speak, sitting right there as plain as anything. It was the first time I was star struck and in the presence of my hero. Someone who loved Art Tatum the way my dad and I did.  It was the only time I saw Oscar live.

 

Not too long after that I was on the kitchen floor doing something with a pencil and a "Pink Pearl" eraser. The eraser was in my hand at the time when my mother asked me if I'd like to take piano lessons. I jumped with such excitement that I snapped the eraser in half and kept jumping for some time after that. I headed straight for the piano to play the thirds I figured out on my own and couldn't wait to play Beethoven and Chopin. 

 

The first time I made a paper record for my cardboard "stereo" that I made with Elmer's glue and bread crumbs, it had Oscar's name on it. The rest of the records after that had my name on them and I would pretend that I was as great as Oscar and drive my mother nuts with a series of "bleems" and "blorms" that turned the kitchen table into my "no mistake piano".  Just one of the reasons I finally started piano lessons. The other reason was easily the real racket I was making at the actual piano.

 

My mother and father both tell me of having the opportunity of meeting Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie that evening and even though I was tempted to meet all time favorite Dizzy, I was too busy making sure no other kid stole my spot next to Oscar backstage that night in 1968 when I was just 6 years old.  Oscar was the man.  

 

I'm born into that part of the world. When I was born the royalty of Montreal jazz wasn't too far away. Oliver Jones remembers holding me in his arms as a baby and Joe Sealy did as well way back in 1962 when the Maple Leafs won the first of three straight Stanley Cups, Kennedy was president and Coke had just come out in cans. My dad jammed with Dougie Richardson the very day I was born and its hardly a wonder some swing rubbed off on me. Chuck Peterson's name is on my certificate of Baptismal as a witness. Later to be a childhood tormentor, a man who would convice a child his socks were in the teapot and just leave it at that. I never got those socks back. Not even as a punchline later.  

 

Dad came home at 3am like Ricky Ricardo and there were always some great stories about this cat or this chick or some crazy ofay who started a fight with a couple of spooks. It was all very good stuff.  I'd get up and eat some saltines with margerine or oleo and just listen to what happens on a gig. There was one club that had these doormen called "little Angelo" and "Big Angelo". I imagined them at the door in big furry hats like the cats in England have. Just standing there at the door, one taller than the other. I had no firm image of them being in the "mob" just two guys named Angelo watching the door, one taller than the other. 

 

My journey was significantly different than it promised at the outset. That is the great lesson in life about making plans and watching things go wrong and dealing with the obstacles in you path as Daisy would teach.  Charlie Parker may have said "learn the lyrics" but he also said something about it not coming out of your horn if you don't live it. I was born into it.

 

My parents however were not so lucky while my progress on piano was a hot topic. Sometimes I hoped that if I was proficient on the instrument they would just have to stop fighting because I had a "gift". They were unhappy, violent, abusive people and only my brother was spared physical abuse. My world was crumbling before my eyes. It really sunk in the day the movers came for the piano while my dad was playing a gig in Burlington, Vermont. I was sitting at the piano trying to keep my reading together when they arrived. I was trying to keep my chops up because my father hit me while I was practising and I cut my lip on the ivory keys. After the lessons stopped I just kept reading all the music in the house. My mother had planned a few things out and even booked my dad into Vermont to pull it off.

 

My mother had enough and we moved to Ville St. Laurent where my dreams of playing piano were left behind in favour of being a hockey player, not just another kid who plays the game, but a kid who means to get into the NHL. My mother had taken up with my "Uncle Al" who was a family friend that crossed lines I was too young to truly understand. Musically I was a has-been and I was only 8 years old. I still dabbled at the piano but lost my reading skills to the point where when a piano was brought into my grade 3 classroom I couldn't even read from the Dr. Seuss songbook anymore. This was a sad time in my life and I wasn't truly serious about music again until we moved to Ontario and I discovered the guitar.