The Book Cooks Introduction The front room of Sonny Greenwich’s house on the Ottawa River is lined by windows, and the windows by vertical blinds. Where there are walls there are awards and acknowledgments: the Order of Canada, several Juno and Félix nominations, a number of Jazz Report trophies and a variety of other honours, (1) as well as a yellowed crossword puzzle clipped and framed from the National Post, April 19, 2001, in which the clue for 39 Across is “Canadian jazz guitarist Greenwich.” (2) The house itself sits in a small riverside neighbourhood in Vaudreuil-Dorion, Quebec, just a few kilometres from the point where the Ottawa River flows into the St. Lawrence, there to continue downstream past Montreal. Greenwich has only a seasonal view of the water, which is otherwise obscured by trees and by a neighbour’s tall hedge; a path leads to the riverbank, where there is a dock but no boat, a found metaphor for his career as a musician – a career that has seen him remain close to shore, so to speak, rarely venturing out far enough to catch the currents that might have carried him to greater renown in the world of jazz. As it is, Greenwich is at least a fabled figure on the Canadian scene and, in his day, was something of a legend well beyond it. His 50-year career has been a tale of three cities – Toronto, New York and Montreal – and then just two – Montreal and Toronto. It is a tale, as he tells it, paced by his encounters with American musicians as noted as Sun Ra, Coleman Hawkins, John Handy and Miles Davis – a tune, a set, an evening, perhaps a week or two and, once, four months – and remembered with evident satisfaction for the validations that often followed, be they words of praise, recommendations or offers of work. In truth, his has been a modest and rather private career, one interrupted by health issues, diverted by other interests and ultimately driven by a higher purpose. “I’m not a working musician,” he declared with some finality in 1978. “When I decide to play, I play to awake people spiritually. That’s the only reason.” (3) It has also been a career restricted by the opportunities available to any artist in Canada who would challenge the country’s inherent conservatism in matters creative. Originality has not been a valued quality on the Canadian jazz scene, where musicians tend to be measured against their American contemporaries and counterparts, inevitably to be judged as wanting when they fail to size up. Never mind that they might be working from a different and rather more personal pattern altogether. (4) The opportunities to record, in particular, were for many years limited to those Canadian jazz musicians who did in fact “size up.” Accordingly, Greenwich made his first LP under his own name only in 1970 and only for a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) transcription series; his second and third recordings followed at four-year intervals, and his fourth fully eight years later. He would complete a total of 16 LPs and CDs as a leader or co-leader, and another 11 as a sideman – recordings that take on disproportionate significance in shaping the narrative of his later career, given the infrequency of his public performances. As original – as personal – as Greenwich’s music might have been in its day, it was not without either precedent or parallel in jazz. But those precedents and parallels were not to be found in Canada during his formative years – or for many years after, although Canadian musicians would eventually catch up with him and with jazz more generally. His music seems all the more personal for his tendency to speak of it in terms that are uniquely and rather equivocally his own. He resists the suggestion that it might have been shaped by any of its apparent influences, particularly that of John Coltrane, to whom he has been so routinely compared – and to whom he has dedicated the compositions Libra Ascending and Mr. J.C., with their references to Coltrane’s Giant Steps and One and Four, respectively. (5) He points instead to the inspiration of classical music and – as if by some form of synesthesia – to the impact of paintings by Paul Klee. At its most personal, his music nevertheless followed in the incantatory, transcendent tradition of “spiritual jazz” attendant to the American avant-garde of the mid-1960s, as advanced so passionately by Coltrane and his fellow saxophonists Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders. Greenwich himself was also part of that initial wave, albeit at the remove of Canada. He was, equally, one of the very first guitarists – and certainly the first Canadian – to embrace it. Demographically, he is a member of the generation of Canadians born in the 1920s and 1930s that gave the world of jazz such noted figures as the pianists Oscar Peterson and Paul Bley, the trumpeters Maynard Ferguson and Kenny Wheeler, the trombonist and arranger Rob McConnell, the clarinetist and composer Phil Nimmons, the saxophonists Moe Koffman and Fraser MacPherson, and the guitarist Ed Bickert. More narrowly, he is also a member of the same generation of African-Canadians that included Peterson and his fellow pianists Wray Downes, Oliver Jones, Milt Sealey and Joe Sealy, as well as the saxophonists Bucky Adams, Richard Parris and Dougie Richardson, the guitarist Nelson Symonds, the drummers Archie Alleyne and Norman Marshall Villeneuve, and the singers Phyllis Marshall and Gwen Tynes – all, remarkably, from a racial group that in 1931 numbered, nationally, fewer than 20,000. (6) A member, but not exactly a product. He has always stood somewhat apart, at first by circumstance and then by choice, a creation of his own invention, cultivation and perhaps even calculation. In the words of Toronto pianist and bassist Don Thompson, who took a significant role in Greenwich’s music for more than 30 years, “Sonny’s different.” It is an observation made only in admiration. “Sonny doesn’t play like anybody else,” Thompson continues. “He doesn’t think like anybody else. He doesn’t do anything like anybody else.” (7) The Montreal pianist James Gelfand, who collaborated with Greenwich in Thompson’s stead during the mid-1990s, agrees. “When you listen to Sonny’s playing,” Gelfand marvels, less grammatically but more specifically and succinctly, “it’s so un-anybody else.” (8) Greenwich’s exceptionalism has of course had its consequences, leaving him – at least in his own mind – misunderstood, an outsider. “People,” he has been known to say, “think I’m this far-out person.” He usually sounds quite pleased by the notion; occasionally, he seems a little rueful. He is otherwise guarded and even rather defensive when, in a characteristically soft voice, he speaks of himself – a man not given to narrative, to detail or to introspection, much less to willing self-revelation. As the headline of a profile in Saturday Night put it in 1978, “Sonny Greenwich keeps his secrets.” (9) ‘Twas ever thus. And, it seems, still is. He is by nature both an enigmatic and a charismatic figure, a complementary paradox in which the mystery only deepens the magnetism. His club and concert performances in Montreal and Toronto typically drew a devoted group of followers who were members of the study group that he established during the late 1960s in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment and that he led through the 1970s. Many continued to follow him closely for years after. “My music and my spirituality can’t be separated,” he insisted in 1978. “After all, I don’t live as a musician but as a spiritual being.” (10) That dichotomy is reflected in Of Stars and Strings, whose title is taken from one of some 60 Greenwich compositions on record. There is ultimately more in the following pages about strings than stars, figuratively speaking, but no consideration of his life and music could be complete without both.
Chapter Twelve It had four names, two each in English and French: the Jazz Workshop and the Barrel Theatre, l’Atelier de Jazz and le Baril. A hand-drawn sign over the front door – down a few steps at the northwest corner of the O’Sullivan Building on Mountain Street near St. Catherine – split the difference: l’Atelier de Jazz Workshop. (1) The Barrel opened as a discotheque in October 1965 and also served as the site of productions of plays by LeRoi Jones and Tennessee Williams before a local jazz promoter, Mike Armstrong, who had previously used the Café Pascale and Moose Hall, took it over in the fall of 1966. For several months in 1967 Armstrong was responsible for a remarkable, if largely forgotten interlude in the history of jazz in Montreal. John Norris, writing in Coda, made note of the Barrel’s “psychedelic atmosphere” and suggested that it suited the blues and rock music played there earlier in the evening – by Influence, the Rabble and other Montreal bands – but “[sat] uncomfortably within a jazz setting.” (2) Geoffrey Young, in a later issue of Coda, described the room in greater and rather more approving detail. “It is comfortable, inexpensive, dimly lit,” he wrote, almost in point form. “Barrels are tables, chairs spaced, coffee is available and the waiter does not bother you. Indeed he operates as if you want nothing but the music.” (3) Sonny Greenwich appeared at the Jazz Workshop shortly before and soon after his US sojourn with John Handy. (4) He returned home in March 1967 to find that Armstrong was ready to move beyond the bebop that trumpeter Ron Proby, pianist Sadik Hakim and tenor saxophonist Jack Bonus had played there in the interim. With Greenwich assisting the transition, Armstrong would turn by the summer to the avant-garde sounds from New York that were being promoted as the New Thing or the New Wave (5) and that gave resounding expression to the heightened racial, social and cultural tensions rending America during the 1960s. In retrospect, the Jazz Workshop’s transition seems to have been signaled by the appearance in February of pianist Paul Bley, for whom the engagement there – the first of two – was a homecoming of sorts. Bley had left Montreal, the city of his birth, for New York in 1953 and spent the next several years traversing both the United States and the landscape of modern jazz, working with such disparate figures as Chet Baker, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Don Ellis, Jimmy Giuffre, Sonny Rollins and Albert Ayler. His association with Coleman in 1958 and with Ayler, if only in passing in 1964, had taken him to the very limits of the avant-garde. But Bley instinctively drew back. While he embraced its freedom from bebop’s structural concerns, he shied away from its expressive extremes, as well a Canadian might, and by 1967 had set for himself a more personal, indeed idiosyncratic course that was as open to impulse as the freest of jazz, but that remained comparatively understated by the rhetorical measure of the New Thing. Greenwich opened at the Jazz Workshop in late March and stayed there for the better part of three months, at first working after hours on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, and later six nights a week. He and Bley shared the bill for the two evenings of Bley’s return engagement in early June. The Jazz Workshop’s advertising in La Presse initially highlighted Greenwich’s recent success in New York: “John Handy… Carnegie… Down Beat.” (6) The last – Down Beat – had just published a review in which the New York critic Dan Morgenstern identified Greenwich as “a real find” on the basis of his playing with John Handy at Carnegie Hall; (7) the British critic Stanley Dance, writing about the same concert for the March issue of the London magazine Jazz Journal, described Greenwich as “a new and impressive guitarist from Toronto.” (8) As Greenwich’s Jazz Workshop run continued, the club changed promotional tack, touting Greenwich’s music rather cryptically as “un Jazz Psychanalique,” (9) an allusion either to its exploratory nature or its depth, possibly both. “I pushed it way farther,” Greenwich admits, confirming in general terms the direction that he took there with Marius Cultier, a technically audacious pianist recently arrived from Martinique, drummer Cyril Lepage, and various bassists. “I remember the owner of the place came up to me once and said, ‘That scared me. That really scared me.’” With Greenwich’s departure in late June, Mike Armstrong presented a succession of musicians who were central to the burgeoning New York avant-garde lately documented by recordings on the Impulse! and ESP-Disk’ labels. Alto saxophonist Marion Brown was first, followed by drummer Sunny Murray, who was in residence with Pharoah Sanders and others when word reached Montreal of John Coltrane’s death on July 17. Tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, trombonist Grachan Moncur III and tenor saxophonists Albert Ayler and Frank Wright completed the Jazz Workshop’s summer season, each with his own band. Two other New York saxophonists, Marzette Watts and Noah Howard, appeared there toward the end of the year. But the Jazz Workshop, no less than any other divertissement in Montreal that summer, was caught in the long shadow of Expo 67, Man and His World, the celebrated world’s fair that ran from April to October and attracted 50 million visitors to some 90 pavilions on the St. Helen’s and Notre Dame islands in the St. Lawrence River. That shadow was further darkened by the Jazz Workshop’s chosen hours of operation, midnight to 6 a.m. Notwithstanding a remarkable series of feature articles written by Gilles Ouellet for La Presse (10) – remarkable in terms of the coverage devoted by a Canadian daily newspaper to African-American musicians all but unknown to its readers – audiences were generally small. Stuart Broomer, visiting from Toronto for a performance at Expo 67 with his Kinetic Ensemble, remembered “a scattering of people” for Albert Ayler one early morning in August, (11) while Geoffrey Young numbered Frank Wright’s listeners in September a little more precisely as “less than a dozen.” (12) Greenwich sat in with several of the New York musicians, beginning with Marion Brown, whose quartet included Rashied Ali; Greenwich and Ali had played together with John Handy one night at the Village Vanguard 17 months earlier, an encounter that established Ali as Greenwich’s paradigm for drummers. Some of his other interactions at the Jazz Workshop were less fulfilling, however, leaving him with something of the same wariness that he had felt when he worked with Sun Ra in Montreal six years earlier. “I played with a lot of good musicians there – a lot of good musicians and a lot of musicians you don’t know whether they’re good or not. It was that avant-garde thing where you didn’t know exactly whether they could play, some of them.” As it happened, his uncertainty about “some of them” mirrored the doubts that other Montreal musicians were having just then about Greenwich himself, to the extent that they were paying him any mind at all. The Jazz Workshop was his first extended engagement in the city under his own name, and he was effectively branded as avant-garde by association, despite his familiarity and skill with the standard jazz repertoire. “In Montreal, I was an outcast, too,” he suggests, “because I played at that club, the Barrel, which was all avant-garde musicians. So I was considered – as I had been in Toronto – avant-garde. People like Charlie Biddle, they thought ...” Greenwich leaves the sentiment unfinished. Biddle, an American bassist who had moved to the city in 1948, took an unadventurous approach to jazz and, for his pragmatism, would be as successful as any Montreal musician over the next 50 years in finding work, culminating in a long association, beginning in 1981, with an Aylmer Street club that bore his name. However sceptically Greenwich was received by the Charlie Biddles of the Montreal scene, he was not even the most avant-garde of the local musicians who worked at the Jazz Workshop. That distinction went instead, later in 1967, to tenor saxophonist Jean (Doc) Préfontaine, trumpeter Yves Charbonneau, bass guitarist Maurice Richard and drummer Guy Thouin of the Quatuor de nouveau jazz libre du Québec, for whom the revolutionary spirit of the New Thing resonated with their own resistance as white indépendantistes to the oppression that they felt as Québécois in Canada. (13) Its political agenda aside, Jazz libre – as it came to be known over its seven-year history of musical, social and political activism – favoured improvisation without predetermined structure, although not without echoes of Ornette Coleman and of the musicians on the Impulse! and ESP-Disk’ rosters. “From the standpoint of freedom, we are maybe freer than most of the other groups,” Préfontaine told Emmanuel Cocke in late 1967, with the sound of the New York bands at the Jazz Workshop still ringing in his ears. “Archie Shepp likes to have a simple foundation to set off his solos; we try to be free altogether.” (14) Not for Greenwich, however, the absence of form in music. When asked by Barney Kessel a dozen years later whether he had ever played “without any kind of tempo, or without even a harmonic structure,” his response was unequivocal. “No, I don’t believe in that at all. A lot of people do it, but I always have a basis for what I’m doing. I definitely believe in having a structure that you can go away from.” (15) Nevertheless, Greenwich came to be regarded in Montreal, as he had been in Toronto, as a rare Canadian proponent of the New Thing – much as his father’s fellow Hamiltonian, Jackie Washington, a jovial entertainer who had a large repertoire of pop songs dating back to his days with the Washington Brothers in the 1930s, found himself associated rather too conveniently with the American folk-blues revival of the 1960s. In each case, the fact that Greenwich and Washington were black was as much a consideration in how they were perceived by Canadians as the specifics of the music that they were playing. There were no such concerns or qualifications in August 1967 when Greenwich made his first significant showing in the “Talent Deserving Wider Recognition” category for guitarists in Down Beat magazine’s International Jazz Critics’ Poll. He had already received votes from John Norris of Coda in 1965 and 1966, (16) to which Don Heckman of the Los Angeles Times and Eric T. Vogel of the German magazine Jazz Podium added their support in 1967. Together, they brought Greenwich into the lower, though still respectable reaches of a list topped, in a tie, by George Benson and Jimmy Raney. (17) Norris, Vogel and the British critic Max Harrison voted for Greenwich with similar results in 1968, as did Norris, Vogel and, again, Don Heckman in 1969; the category was won in those years by Larry Coryell and Pat Martino, respectively, the latter briefly Greenwich’s successor with John Handy in 1967. (18) Of course, Greenwich had never performed in Los Angeles, much less anywhere in Europe, and would not be represented in any significant way on record until 1971, leaving open the question as to how Heckman, Vogel and Harrison might have heard him. Circumstantially, however, it appears as though Vogel had visited Canada, inasmuch he also voted in 1967 for Nelson Symonds, who would effectively remain unrecorded for another 23 years. (19) Just as Greenwich was concluding his three-month stand at the Jazz Workshop, Don Thompson and [drummer] Terry Clarke were on the verge of leaving John Handy, their departure prompted by the requirement that they register for the U.S. military draft as a condition of renewing their work permits. This, at a time when nearly a half-million American soldiers were directly engaged in the Vietnam War. Thompson and his wife Norma made their way to Montreal via Vancouver in August, staying briefly with the Greenwich family above a dépanneur in the south shore suburb of Longueuil, then taking an apartment of their own nearby. They expected Clarke to follow but he accepted an offer instead from the Fifth Dimension, an American vocal group on the cusp of international success, and remained stateside for another two and a half years. Thompson and Greenwich immediately tried to form a band under Greenwich’s name, but even with Thompson ready, willing and more than able to play either piano or bass as required, they were unsuccessful, absent Clarke, in their efforts to find other musicians suited to their purpose. “Sonny and I had so many different people play with us,” Thompson told Bill Smith and David Lee of Coda in 1983, “that it never did turn into a band. We went through different drummers and bass players, and a piano player played with us for a while. It was always different and with Sonny we’ve always had this problem, getting a set thing that we could build [on].” (20) Work, in turn, proved no easier to come by. With Jazz libre effectively the house band at the Jazz Workshop through the fall of 1967, Thompson and Greenwich looked elsewhere. Thompson played with saxophonist Lee Gagnon at Gagnon’s Guy Street club, la Jazztek, where Greenwich appeared more occasionally, and a Greenwich quartet was heard in November at the New Penelope, a Sherbrooke Street coffeehouse that otherwise presented Canadian and American folk and blues musicians. (21) Greenwich also took a week in November at Soul City, a Mountain Street nightspot whose history dated back to the fabled Café St. Michel of the late 1930s and the 1940s. (22) Several noted American stars preceded him there during its brief run as a jazz room in the fall of 1967, not least tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, whose pianist for the engagement was McCoy Tyner, late of the John Coltrane Quartet. Greenwich and Tyner renewed acquaintances, leading Tyner to play with Greenwich, probably at the New Penelope, and Greenwich to sit in with Turrentine at Soul City. The latter occasion was notable for the saxophonist’s apparent attempt to embarrass his guest. “Right away,” Thompson explains, “Stanley gave Sonny the first solo on a tune that Sonny had never heard before. You know, that old-fashioned jive? But it didn’t faze Sonny in the slightest.” With work at best intermittent, Greenwich and Thompson played duets at Thompson’s Longueuil apartment during the day and, weather permitting, haunted Mount Royal, across the river in Montreal proper, at night. By then it was clear, and in retrospect clearer still, that the significance of Greenwich’s time with John Handy was not the limited exposure that he had received in the United States but the connection that he had made with Thompson, one that they continued to develop during the four months that Thompson spent in Montreal. “We’d walk around the mountain,” he remembers, of those first weeks in Montreal, initially as Greenwich’s guest and then as his neighbour, “and we’d talk about music and we’d look for UFOs at the same time. I don’t know how serious we were, but even now, I never look at the sky without looking for UFOs. It was summer and it was really beautiful. You could see the stars and Sonny would talk about playing for the whole universe. Not just for the audience in the club but for the whole universe. And when you think about it, his music is really, really big. Every note that he plays is a big note; he doesn’t play anything that’s small. So it makes sense – the idea that every note that he plays is going to go to the farthest star.”
Notes
Introduction/“So un-anybody else”
Chapter 12/Jazz Workshop
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