When jazz was king

Author John Gilmore on the mafia, race-relations and his newly re-printed title Swinging in Paradise: The Story of Jazz in Montreal

Jazz enthusiasts and anyone interested in Montreal’s cultural history will be stoked to learn John Gilmore’s definitive history of the local jazz scene, Swinging in Paradise: The Story of Jazz in Mon­treal, first published by Véhicule Press in 1988 but long out-of-print, has recently been reissued. A painstakingly researched effort that took Gilmore seven years to complete, Swinging in Paradise is a riveting look back at a remarkable era in Montreal’s musical history and well worth picking up. The Mirror spoke to the author from his home in Berlin.

Mirror: Was Prohibition indirectly responsible for the birth of Montreal’s jazz scene?

John Gilmore: Montreal had a reputation for good times, tolerance and beautiful women, but what drew musicians here was the incredible amount of work available thanks to all the free-flowing booze. You see, alcohol was being smuggled out of Montreal into the States, and that attracted the Mafia. They corrupted the police and politicians and judges, so the city became wide-open: clubs were open 24 hours a day, prostitution, gambling, smuggling, all kinds of rackets were rampant. It wasn’t a healthy environment socially or politically, but it generated an incredible amount of work for musi­cians because there were hundreds of clubs and each one had live music.

M: During the 1930s-60s American jazz musicians, especially those on drugs, were relentlessly targeted and harassed by the police. Was it the same way here?

JG: In the 40s a single joint got you six months in jail in Montreal. Several important jazz musicians were jailed and deported back to the States for possession of marijuana. Others told me they were watched and harassed by the cops only because they were known heroin addicts, not because they were jazz musicians.

M: Were newly emerging subgenres/styles greeted with the same intense disapproval here as they were elsewhere? Would a late 1950s Montreal audience attack Ornette Coleman and throw his sax off a cliff like they did in Texas, or were they more open to new sounds?

JG: From the very beginning jazz met with resistance and disapproval from straight society. And as each new style of jazz has emerged, some people have been resistant. Bebop was once considered outrageous; now it’s mainstream. Free jazz was hard to swallow for many people, even jazz musicians; it still is. But players came through town—Albert Ayler, Sunny Murray, Coltrane. And there was an incredible burst of musical innovation and experimentation in Montreal around 1970—most of it coming from Quebecois musicians. Chansoniers like Charlebois went electric. Walter Boudreau and Raoul Duguay had a wild big band called l’Infonie that mixed all styles of music together. Jazz Libre was caterwauling and preaching revolution. And that helped pave the way for the musique actuelle movement that took off in Quebec in later years.

M: Was life easier for racially integrated bands here than in the States?

JG: Black, white, English, French, they were all playing jazz together in Montreal as far back as the 20s. The workplace is where they sometimes met barriers. But there were integrated jazz bands in Montreal clubs and dance halls by the end of Second World War. Oscar Peterson’s first steady job was playing in an otherwise all-white big band led by a local trumpet-player named John­ny Holmes. They broke the colour barrier at the Ritz-Carleton Hotel during WWII. The problem was that club owners wanted either an all-white or all-black show. So musicians, black and white, were blocked from working certain clubs depending on the show policy. It happened both ways. White musicians never played in the show band at Rockhead’s Paradise either.

M: Besides a few internationally revered musicians like Oscar Peterson, Paul Bley and Maynard Ferguson, it seems like many talented Montreal jazz artists still languish in obscurity.

JG: Montreal was the centre of the Canadian recording industry prior to WWII, but very little jazz was recorded here. The record companies weren’t interested; other styles of music were more prof­itable. We’ll never know what some of the legendary Montreal jazz bands sounded like. Their music is lost forever. That fact necessarily shaped the way I wrote my book: I couldn’t write a history of the music per se, so it’s really the story of the Montreal jazz community—how the musicians lived and worked, how their lives and music were affected by Quebec politics, the Mafia, corruption, racism, union battles and the insatiable demands of the nightclub industry for live music. Montreal was unique, and so was its jazz community. ■

SWINGING IN PARADISE: THE STORY OF JAZZ IN MONTREAL, BY JOHN GILMORE, PB, 320 PP., $22.99. AVAILABLE EXCLUSIVELY THROUGH LULU.COM

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