MISSISSAUGA MUSIC WALK OF FAME

He’d grown up immersing himself in the Bon Jovi albums Slippery When Wet and New Jersey and was blown away by the songs and the band.

He was a budding guitarist who might have found a little fuel for his big musical ambitions that night in a couple of lines of one favourite song that the band played, a song that was the calling card of his own youth: “We’ll Make it I Swear – Livin’ on a Prayer.”

You might say his prayers began to be answered on April 14, 2011, when he got a call from an unknown New York number. “Hi Phil. This is Jon Bon Jovi. Give me a call.”

That’s what began the slow integration process that five years later saw the man they call Phil X officially succeed Richie Sambora in a band he’d idolized for many years.

Not bad for a kid who launched his career singing Elvis.

Phil grew up in a Mississauga household filled with music, mostly Greek music. After being given his first guitar (a copy of a Vox hollow-body teardrop model) which he could barely hold at age 5, he watched and learned as his musician father Peter played bouzouki and sang.

It was Phil’s father who, during his band’s intermission at a “big fat Greek wedding” convinced his son to play and sing Blue Suede Shoes and Teddy Bear.

The audience was enthralled with the 8-year-old — and he was enthralled with their enthusiastic response.

At 17, he was bartending at his Dad’s pub. The Magnet in Westdale Mall. When Dad went on vacation, Phil booked his own band to play the small corner stage.

For six years Phil played in a band named Sidinex, which was his surname spelled backward. They played covers of metal bands and made an EP in 1985 that placed in the top 25 in Q107’s Homegrown contest.

After a sound man for Frozen Ghost heard him play he alerted producer Arnold Lanni who checked him out at The Gasworks, then rushed him into the studio to record with Frozen Ghost. After working with Aldo Nova he succeeded Rik Emmett in Mississauga’s ultimate metal band Triumph.

Starting anew after moving to L.A. in 1997, Phil was painting producer Scott Humphrey’s garage when Tommy Lee needed a guitar player for Methods of Mayhem.

The paint strokes were swapped for guitar strokes on a Les Paul. Phil’s work must have been impressive because it quickly led to additional sessions for Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper, with whom he recorded Brutal Planet.

A Chris Daughtry recording in 2005 cemented his growing reputation. Phil X has since marked the spot as “supreme session guitarist for hire” on records by Chris Cornell, Avril Lavigne, Kelly Clarkson, and Thousand Foot Crutch, to name just a few.

And he still finds time for his own band, Phil X and The Drills.

What marks Phil’s work is total commitment — whether squeezing the last ounce of energy and sound from his instrument, straining for that last squeal out of his voice or searching for the exact pace and tone that best suits the material.

Phil’s a generous teacher – as a series of legendary YouTube videos attest.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, he should be flattered at the seemingly endless supply of copycat efforts.

He’s also generous with his time, whether on GTA school visits or guesting at clinics or on podcasts.

When a 25-year-old Mississauga woman and hobby musician died suddenly of congenital heart failure a beloved guitar she had designed was donated to a local guitar shop. Phil heard of it and played it in concert at a Bon Jovi show at Air Canada Centre to honour her memory and her creative flair.

That brought immeasurable comfort to her grieving family.

Phil X and his irrepressible style epitomize the infectious energy that’s at the heart of the music he plays.

He says he still gets goosebumps when he kicks in with the talk box on “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Which may explain why so many of the rest of us also have that same reaction. He’s never lost the joy of performing that thrilled all those people at that long-ago wedding.

And he’s able to convey that same sense of joy to his audience every time he picks up a guitar or sings.

An exemplary career that’s taken him from a childhood covering Elvis to electrifying Bon Jovi means Phil X marks the place on Mississauga’s Music Walk of Fame.

Legacy stories run in rich veins through Bobby Dean Blackburn’s life. His great grandfather Elias Earls traveled the Underground Railroad from Kentucky to its terminus in Owen Sound where he married a local girl. Bobby Dean has recently served as artistic director for the town’s Emancipation Festival, established in 1862. His ancestors likely attended the same picnic celebration in their own time and sang some of the same songs.

Like the pioneers in his family, Bobby Dean’s musical sojourn has traveled a long road that’s taken him across the GTA, Ontario and Canada. It started at York Memorial High School where his band The Gems won a talent contest and played the first ever school dance. His reward was a threat of expulsion from the principal for “deteriorating the morals” of students by playing rock and roll.

He quit school at 16. He’s essentially been on the road ever since.
Bobby Dean and the Gems fought the Battle of the Bands with Toronto’s other top groups The Consuls and the Wildwoods. He recorded a version of You Are My Sunshine at age 13 at Fred Roden’s Record Corral on Yonge St. There was an offer from Nashville, which his father flatly turned down.
The Gems headlined dances before Bobby Dean truly made his name at the Zanzibar a Go Go, playing 4 hours every afternoon.

There were no after-hours clubs back then, so the Zanzibar became the home-away-from-home for every name jazz, blues and R&B player passing through town.

Music critic Jack Batten described it in 1973 as “the only room in Toronto, maybe in the whole world, where jazz musicians can wander in at any hour of the afternoon and jam away the daylight hours to an appreciative audience of their peers and their fans.” Bobby Dean was the ringmaster.

A short list of those who jammed at his Zanzibar Finishing School includes Paul Butterfield, Rick James, Buddy Miles, Jimmy McGriff, Taj Mahal, Richard “Groove” Holmes, David-Clayton Thomas, Roland Prince, Dougie Richardson, Don (D.T.) Thompson, Eugene Smith and Steve Kennedy. The Blackburn homes in Brampton and Malton, where the family lived for the better part of 40 years, were filled with musicians coming to pay their respects and play.

Blackburn took a three-year hiatus when his doctor diagnosed “smoker’s cough.” He resumed playing after B.B. King told him “you should never quit
playing because you never know when you might make it.” He moved to the
Bruce Peninsula about a decade ago and has revived his career – and not coincidentally the local bar scene – up there.

Blackburn’s CV includes a gospel TV show that tapped his childhood roots singing lead in Baptist church choirs, 3 years playing solo in Yellowknife and a gig on an Alaskan cruise ship.

He was the first black coach in the Mississauga Hockey League. He went back to Westwood Secondary School at 57 to complete his high school diploma and was chosen as valedictorian by hi fellow adult students.
His four sons have grown up imbued with their father’s music and his passion for it. Their Maple Blues-winning Juno-nominated “band of brothers” proudly carries the Blackburn name.

Bobby Dean counts a recent appearance with Blackburn at Summer Folk as one of his career highlights. Many of the group’s songs carry lyrical references to the family history.

In one, son Duane sings “My father played the blues/ always the real deal/ down on Yonge St.” Bobby Dean Blackburn is the real deal to a lot more people than just his sons. Music has been his life for six decades. It still is. Every gig in every bar in every town across Canada has taken him another step towards his arrival today on the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame.

A group of some of the most seasoned professional musicians in Canada once played through a new arrangement — written by Ron Harrison — of the classic Québecois folk song Un Canadien Errant.

When they finished playing, they looked at each other in awe — and then stood collectively as one to give him a standing ovation.

That doesn’t happen very often among professional musicians. But then, Ron Harrison has a talent that doesn’t happen very often among professional music writers.

Harrison was in the front ranks of Canadian composers for many decades, largely because of his ability to seamlessly match music with visual images on the screen, somehow creating a third dimension — one that speaks to the emotional core of the viewer.

In retrospect, it almost seems Harrison was genetically and culturally pre-disposed to become a film composer. His father Harold was a big band leader in Britain before he emigrated to Canada and played piano in silent movie theatres in Hamilton. When talkies killed the industry, the elder Harrison became a film projectionist.

“I was brought up on music and film my whole life to the point where I could look at a film and know exactly what kind of music it needs,” Harrison says. More than one of his employers has told the self-effacing Mississaugan that he was the most talented film composer they’d ever worked with. One even told him “You hit the nail on the head every time.”

Harrison has scored more than 750 television series, specials and films and was recruited by Disney Corp. when they came looking for, quote/unquote “The Best Composer in Canada.” He was subsequently nominated for a Grammy for his writing for the How The Grinch Stole Christmas CD-ROM.

He demonstrated his ingenuity and adventure in that project by showcasing Silent Night in a minor key, highlighted by Black Sabbath-style guitar played by his son David.

Harrison’s legacy will endure most profoundly in the vocabulary of the music that accompanies nature films. He was originally commissioned to do four wildlife film scores. He proved so adept at it that it “snowballed” into a whole industry and many him a very much in demand commodity for a great many years.

In the Audubon Wildlife series of more than 100 films that was sold in 60 countries around the globe, Harrison pioneered not only a style of sound for wilderness productions but what amounted to a new language.
“He won’t take credit for it,” says his daughter Anne, who heard much of that language being developed as her father worked at the piano. “But if you listen to what they’re doing now, you’ll hear his influence in those long-held notes and extensions.”

A lifelong learner, Harrison had his own band at 15, studied with fellow Mississauga Music Walk of Fame inaugural inductee Oscar Peterson in his 20s, attended the Eastman music school in Rochester, took film composition at UCLA and studied with the famed Canadian composer and music theoretician Gord Delamont for seven years.

Perfectionist that he is, Harrison was finally shown the door by Delamont who told him “there’s nothing more I can teach you.”
After he’d finished putting together a project, Harrison would always ask the question: “Who shall we get to conduct this now?”
The answer was almost always the same – he’d be told he should do it himself.

Reluctant though he was, he always handled the job with skill and aplomb and — as usual — he proved to be the best man for the job.

The Mississauga Music Walk of Fame Committee is delighted to welcome a very deserving Ron Harrison to its ranks.

Oscar Peterson’s sound may be the most recognizable thing in jazz.
In fact, it may be the most recognizable thing in music. Millions of jazz fans can tell from just a few notes that they are listening to Oscar play piano — his sense of time, his phrasing, his command and his vitality — they all signify that you are listening to “the Maharaja of the piano” as Duke Ellington famously called him.

Peterson was born in Montreal, was unveiled to the world by his great friend and producer Norman Granz at Carnegie Hall in September 1949 and was embraced by the international jazz community in a career that spanned six decades — and spawned a legacy that is unmatched by any other Canadian jazz player and few other musicians anywhere in the world.

His fellow performers revered Peterson for his impossibly high standards, his relentless drive to be the best and his versatility — which saw him front his brilliant trios, act as the house pianist for Verve Records for a decade and then turn around and become the sensitive accompanist to the best-of-the-best of the jazz singing world, from Billie Holiday to the superb duets of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.

When Oscar Peterson sat down at the piano stool, there was never any doubt that something extraordinary was about to happen. He’d flash that big smile, then unleash that big arsenal of sound to which, he alone, seemed to have exclusive domain.

Fellow pianist Marian McPartland may have put it best when she said: “He creates a different kind of emotion, a heady excitement, because of his overwhelming capacity to dazzle and generate exhilaration. At times, it’s almost as if he’s driven by a force greater than himself that makes him play at an impossible speed, but when he changes pace and performs a reflective piece, one can hear the tender side of Oscar, the voicings he uses that are his alone.”

Peterson was a proud Canadian. His Canadiana Suite is an homage to his homeland that is as breathtaking in its scope as are the variations in landscape from Newfoundland to British Columbia that inspired its creation.

He was also a proud Mississaugan who lived here for some 35 years. Although he won 8 Grammies, the UNESCO International Music Prize, the Governor General’s lifetime achievement award for performing arts, the Jazz at Lincoln Centre award for artistic excellence and the equivalent of the Nobel prize for the arts, the prestigious Praemium Imperiale award, he said that two of the greatest honours in his career were the City’s 2003 tribute day for him, which included an all-star concert at LAC, and the naming of Oscar Peterson Public School in his honour.

Peterson was a mentor and an inspiration to pianists everywhere, from Diana Krall, to Hiromi, the Japanese fusion phenom. The first words she learned to say in English were “Oscar Peterson.”

She told me in an interview before her 2004 tribute concert at LAC that one of her greatest honours was meeting Peterson at his home when she was in her early 20s.

“It was an amazing experience. I could touch his piano. I could play his Boesendorfer. I was seeing my super-hero right in front of me. I was crazy- happy, listening to all of the stories about Frank Sinatra and all the other jazz legends he’s been playing with.

“It was like a dream house to me, with all of the posters of old concerts on the walls. It was like a museum to me.”

She continued by saying “When I got back home I went to the park and they took a picture of me jumping as high in the air as I could. I love jumping. I sent it to Oscar and said this is how I feel to meet you.” That’s how it was for everyone to meet Oscar and to hear his marvellous music.

He made us all leap for joy at his genius.

Critics struggle to try to find the right words to describe Krisztina Szabo’s voice. Her superb mezzo soprano has been called everything from “honeyed” to “ravishing” to “ringing” to “sumptuous” and, of course, the old standard “gorgeous.”

The Chicago Tribune called her acting “deeply poignant” and noted that “Krisztina Szabó stole every scene with her powerful, mahogany voice.” There are not many voices rich and deeply honeyed enough to be described as “mahogany.”

When she made her debut at Lincoln Centre at the Mostly Mozart Festival, the New York Times gushed that her performance was “clear, strong, stately and … endearingly vulnerable.”

Raised in Mississauga and a graduate of Port Credit Secondary School, Krisztina lived here until 1998. She began playing piano at the age of 9, the same year she auditioned with the Toronto Children’s Choir by singing that well-known operatic set piece — “O Canada.” She recalled that it was “the only song I knew.”

She’s learned a few others since then, enough to put her on many of the world’s great opera stages. She studied piano at the University of Western Ontario until her final year when she decided — thank goodness for opera fans around the world — that she wanted to be a singer and not a teacher.

After completing her studies at Western, Szabo applied — via audio tape — to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London England. Although she describes it as a “bit of a fluke” to be accepted without a live audition, one suspects the school recognized genuine talent — even when it arrived via overseas post.

She won the Canadian Opera Company’s Mozart competition and after being accepted into the COC’s Ensemble Studio, she has become a fixture on the national opera scene. She also regularly performs recital, concert and chamber repertoire not just because she genuinely enjoys it, but also in order to remain close to her Toronto home and her husband and daughter.

In 2005 she won the MARTY for Established Performing Artist from the Mississauga Arts Council. Her former Toronto Children’s Choir instructor Jean Bartle says, “even as an 11-year-old she had a magic sound. She’s a lovely person.”

The key to her success in bringing characters to life on stage — characters that could easily be caricatures in the wrong hands — is Szabo’s ability to get inside a role and project the human emotions of the character, while delivering the vocals that have won her plaudits everywhere she has worked.

“You must be vulnerable when you perform,” says Szabo. “It’s that deep emotionality that connects us all. It’s about being human.” In reminding us of that human connection, Szabo’s work consistently rises about the level of great performance and becomes something more — something that distinguishes her as one of those rare artists who have access to that special place where we all live — but which we do not want to show to the world.

Her gift is the gift of revelation of soul through song. It is a rare and unusual gift — and one to be treasured by all.