by SARAH ROWLAND

“I remember driving into New York and just seeing all the huge buildings and thinking, ‘We’re never going to find this guy,’” says Montreal filmmaker Malcolm Fraser. He’s talking about the hunt for Gordon Thomas, who is the subject of Fraser’s inspirational documentary Everything’s Coming My Way: The Life and Music of Gordon Thomas. After a year of trying to track down the 89-year-old singer, Fraser was ready to give up the search for the mysterious outsider musician, and take the movie in a different direction.

“We [he and his wife/codirector Stacey DeWolfe] thought in the worst case scenario, it will turn into some kind of Waiting for Godot-like film,” says Fraser. But it wasn’t only Fraser who was surprised to hook up with the unsung jazz singer, who’s put out countless independent albums with little fanfare and even less monetary compensation. Thomas himself was shocked to hear that a couple of Canadians wanted to make a movie about his life.

“It takes a while to get yourself together with something like that,” says Thomas, calling from a fabric store, his favourite Manhattan hang-out. “But when I did get myself together, I thought how nice it was of them to do all this for me—it was like a fairy tale, only it was true.”

Tuning in to off-key

With their feature character onboard, the little matter of addressing Thomas’s limited vocal range without making fun of him became a point of concern. As we see in the film, there are only so many euphemisms for “off-key.”

Fraser was especially aware of the possible consequences when he premiered Everything’s Coming My Way for Thomas. “Suddenly the clips of people saying less than flattering things about his music seemed really harsh and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe we’re sitting here watching this with Gordon.’ But he didn’t seem to have a problem with it.

“I think that people like to romanticize that outsider artists aren’t self-aware. But I don’t think it’s possible to be an outsider artist without having some kind of awareness.”

And if there’s one thing that Thomas is in tune with, it’s his vocal limitations. “I’m not what you call a pretty singer but I have depth,” says Thomas, who used to hire trained vocalists to sing on his albums but decided he could cut down on costs if he stepped up to the mic.

Bermuda-mania

As part of the film’s brief bio on Thomas’s childhood, we learn that he migrated to the States at the age of three from Bermuda. Although this Caribbean mention takes up about five seconds of the documentary, that was more than enough for locals to treat Thomas like a rock star when they screened the film at the Bermuda international Film Festival.

“It was like being elevated from our everyday lives to this parallel universe,” says Fraser. “People were accosting him on the street like, ‘Oh my God; it’s Gordon Thomas,’ and lining up to buy his CDs and get his autograph.”

Back home, however, it was business as usual for Thomas, who has given up most of the comforts of life to pursue his art and continues to give away his recordings to passers-by on the streets of NYC. But despite this lack of success, throughout the film we see a person who remains positive even when being probed about racial discrimination and abject poverty. Not only that, after nearly a century of rejection, he’s still convinced that his big break is just around the corner. More than once, the angelic octogenarian starts his sentence with, “When my career takes off, I’ll…”

“He’s not that different from any other artist that I know,” says Fraser. “Everybody needs to believe against all rational evidence that somehow, some way, they’ll succeed, because if you don’t have that then there’s no point in trying at all. The only difference I see between Gordon and anyone else is the fact that he’s maintained this positivity as long as he has, and for me that’s truly inspiring.”

EVERYTHING’S COMING MY WAY: THE LIFE AND MUSIC OF GORDON THOMAS SCREENS AS PART OF FILM POP SUNDAY, OCT. 2, 7:30 P.M., AT O PATRO VYS, FOLLOWED BY A GORDON THOMAS PERFORMANCE. FOR MORE INFO VISIT, WWW.FILMPOP.POPMONTREAL.COM

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