Recognizing the careers and achievements of our local music legends.
Mississauga’s Music Walk of Fame in Port Credit Memorial Park was established in 2012 by the late Councillor Jim Tovey. This inaugural ceremony recognizes the amazing musical talents that have come out of Mississauga.
In the past, four inductees had their names forever engraved on granite plaques that are installed in the walking path of Port Credit Memorial Park. Port Credit has a reputation as the musical hub of Mississauga. Therefore, it was fitting to establish the Music Walk of Fame there as well.
This year, to honour the late Councillor Jim Tovey, Jim will be the sole inductee for the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame.
We would like to invite the public to the induction ceremony held on Sunday, July 22 2018. In Port Credit Memorial Park from 3:00-4:00 PM.
What Brian Smith remembers most about the fledgling Malton rock ’n roller he met while they played lacrosse together as teens in the mid-1960s was that “he had a hell of a scream on him.”
Smith, a guitarist, lived in Westwood Village. Jim Tovey, a singer, lived in Victory Village. Smith had a band called The Soul System.
Tovey had a band called The Grass Impact.
The bands would get together to jam. Eventually they would join forces.
“The reason we got Jimmy in the band – which was renamed The System – was because we heard him scream one night,” says Smith.
Tovey was doing his best James Brown and really struck a nerve with his future bandmates. “We knew that anyone who could scream that good would give us a great added attraction,” Smith laughs.
Tovey’s next door neighbour, Bert Mellen, played bass, Al Cairns was on drums, Smith was on guitar and Mike Whitham, the only one who from Brampton, was on keys.
Anyone who knew the enthusiastically independent Jim Tovey will enjoy the thought of him fronting “The System.”
The band played Malton’s two community halls, local high schools and shows at Bramalea Civic Centre where they were often double-billed with another young group named Rush.
Rush bassist Geddy Lee often sat in the front row while The System played, keeping a sharp eye on the work of Bert Mellen to see what he could pick up.
The System’s repertoire of Rhinoceros and Steppenwolf covers, mixed with originals by Smith and Tovey, earned them a spot on the CBC-TV summer show Drop-In, where they played three originals.
Tovey auditioned to host another CBC show but lost out to some guy from Hamilton named Martin Short.
Jim at first appeared headed for a career as a visual artist – his primary arts passion in high school – before the magic of the music carried him away.
He quit high school to play full-time, a decision that didn’t sit well with his parents.
A farmhouse in the country on Airport Rd. where Jim and Bert lived was where the band rehearsed, partied, wrote, rehearsed, partied and rehearsed, not necessarily in that order. Smith stayed there on weekends because his parents wouldn’t let him live there full-time.
“We played every weekend, then went back to our families,” says Smith. “That was the start of it all.”
Jim was a natural showman, who could contort his body in strange ways. He had a confident stage manner, loved to lean out into the audience, swing the mic out and pull it back in and use his very loud voice to full advantage.
Smith, who did imitations of other band’s singers to warm up audiences, couldn’t imitate his own band’s lead singer because he was always changing his approach.
“He was born to be a frontman,” says Smith, who runs his own music promotion business in London, Ont. “He could quickly get people in the palm of his hand.
In a premonition of his future career as a carpenter, Jim cut up chunks of wood before one show, had The System’s name stamped on them and got the audience to play percussion, getting everyone involved — a collaborative style he favoured in all his careers.
He’d studied voice at the Ontario Conservatory of Music and made his singing debut around age 10 in the Christmas Eve concert at Our Lady of The Airways Church.
He would prove to be a much better singer than altar boy.
After The System broke up, Jim was in several groups, including the regularly rotating membership of Bond.
His late brother-in-law Dave Cooper recalled on his blog that “Jim had this idea for a show band called the Alpha String Band. We played Jethro Tull, Moody Blues, that type of classical-inspired rock. We had these coloured suits, pink, blue and white, a different colour for each set.”
The group formed after Tovey met John Oglivey in the subway, lugging a huge case in which he carried his cello.
One can just imagine the conversation:
Jim: “What’s in the case?”
John: “A cello”
Jim: “Cool. Want to be in a band where you get to wear different-coloured suits?”
In his blog, Dave Cooper explains that Jim later lured drummer Paul Nixon – best known for his drumming on Downchild’s original “Flip, Flop & Fly” — to join him, Brian Smith, and “Shady” George Bland in Rockit-88. Most of the band lived together in a house in Westwood Village.
It was a bluesier band that morphed into a group called Live Jive and then transformed into Hott Roxx, the band which survived the longest and for which Jim is probably best remembered. It featured guitarists Dave Harrison and Papa John King and toured extensively showcasing the music of The Rolling Stones.
That ended abruptly when an explosion and fire at a Thunder Bay bar destroyed their uninsured equipment.
Their many friends in the business held a benefit concert — but Hott Roxx never recovered.
Jim, with his wife Lee’s assistance, crafted a second career as a carpenter. They moved to Mississauga in 1989 and he started another career as Ward 1derful councillor in 2010.
Music remained a powerful force in his life.
In 1994, Jim got up on stage with a band at the Grosvenor Exchange bar.
From the moment he nailed a Jaggeresque straight overhead kick to start off Chuck Berry’s “Oh Carol,” Andrew Dixon knew he’d found a fellow-traveller. It took about a month of convincing but Tovey joined the band known as The Primitives. It included Dixon on lead guitar, David Smith on rhythm guitar and backing vocals Bob Heinrich on bass and Dan Hill, later replaced by Stuart Hull, on drums.
They’ve played together since, across the GTA but especially up-and-down Brown’s Line.
His political career slowed the band down a bit, but Tovey continued to co-write songs and the band performed periodically, including backing him at the Waterfront Festival for the song he wrote to celebrate Hazel McCallion’s 40th year in office.
The chorus he wrote perfectly captured the intersection of a disaster and a political coronation:
“When the train it went flying
and the tankers were torn
That was the moment
the legend was born”
In the last few years whenever he felt people were giving him too much credit for one of the numerous projects he’d gotten rolling, Jim was fond of saying that nobody accomplishes anything alone.
It’s true that it often takes a community of people convinced to believe in a good cause before it can be achieved.
But there’s usually a main instigator – somebody who hears “no” and translates that into “there’s still a chance.”
The truth is that Mississauga Music Walk of Fame would not exist except for Jim Tovey’s love of music and his insistence that local players – be they musicians or singers or promoters or composers, be celebrated in – and by – the community that fostered them.
When Jim and Lee visited a music walk of fame in Philadelphia, which was then recreating itself as a city of the arts, Jim saw many names he didn’t recognize. He realized that enshrining names in stone in a local park would educate the public and celebrate many worthy Mississaugans – famous and not so famous – at the same time.
He suggested a “pilot project” that – like so many of his temporary ideas – has turned into something pretty permanent. He recruited a committee and cajoled staff and council on board – using the charm that made his mother say that, even as a child, he could sell anything to anybody.
The rest, as they say, is history — our collective musical history celebrated.
He even helped install the stones the first couple of years.
Jim Tovey was a dynamite package of passion, plans and persistence.
Take, for instance, his idea to have some kind of physical recognition in Port Credit’s streetscape of the village’s rich music and festival culture.
He had the bright notion of having the pedestrian crossing at a major intersection marked in the shape of piano keys.
In the city that Tovey’s piano hero Oscar Peterson called home for the last 35 years of his life, it seemed most appropriate.
But the official answer was no.
So Tovey went home and figured out – to scale – how it could be done, then went to the works yard to chat with the template maker.
The next week he got a call to visit the works yard to see the test strip of piano keys that had been painted on the parking lot.
When they were installed at Hurontario St. and Lakeshore Rd., a photo of the “piano keys” intersection taken from on high from a nearby condo went viral on the Internet.
That was the Jim Tovey that people in the musical and political communities shared – a man bursting with ideas from his hyperactive imagination with an infectious way of expressing them — so everybody sang along when it was time for the chorus.
The piano keys were just a quirky little dab on our landscape but they spoke volumes about the talent of the City of Mississauga’s musical frontman – James Michael Tovey.
We welcome him into the place that clearly wouldn’t exist without him: Mississauga’s Music Walk of Fame.
The many artists, record company and music industry executives who paid tribute to Randy Lennox earlier this year when he received the Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award at the Junos had some trouble defining his skill set.
Bono & U2, Gord Downie, Bob Ezrin, Kiefer Sutherland and other friends couldn’t decide if he should be recognized for:
It was probably a case of “all of the above.”
Before he became head of Bell Media two years ago, Randy had been Music Industry Executive of the year seven times and Universal Music had been named Label of the Year for 15 consecutive years. His company won 185 Junos during his tenure.
He’s been named one of Canada’s 50 most influential people by Macleans Magazine, is in the Music Hall of Fame and would likely be on Canada’s Walk of Fame if he wasn’t so busy serving on its board.
A record store clerk at Sam The Record Man before he talked his way into a job – working for free – in the mailroom at MCA Records, Lennox eventually worked his way up to become head of the company – after he’d pulled a few mergers to make it the right size for him.
Randy’s peers, and the artists he represented, identified different aspects of his career but they all agreed on one singular source of that success – his quality of character.
Perhaps Peter Gabriel said it best, “I’ve been signed to many different labels around the world but in Canada, I just wanted to be on the label where Randy was.”
Kiefer Sutherland called Randy “a global face of the Canadian music industry for decades now.”
When he was a kid, Randy was already honing his future musical scouting skills. He’d go into his bedroom each week and compile his own list of what he thought the CHUM chart should look like.
When the list actually came out, he’d work on his future lobbying skills by phoning the station to argue that his list was better than theirs.
His eye for spotting and nurturing talent and his loyalty to his clients are legendary.
His success has many sources. One of them is his willingness to outwork everyone else in the business.
Another is his understanding of his role to push everyone, including himself, out of their comfort zones.
And his appreciation that the music business stands on the shoulders of those it serves.
“The true joy of our business is the sense of discovery and the unconditional belief in an artist, committing to their gift, seeing and feeling their spirit and sharing their journey and always remaining awestruck, never losing sight that you are there to serve their vision,” he says. “You stand behind them through thick and thin.”
Canadian artists big, medium and small could not have been more expertly served by their champion.
For a girl who started out singing made-up songs to her hairbrush and her horse in a small voice, Alex Pangman has come a long way.
Her innate musicality caused her to compose songs in her childhood Erin Mills home. She’s ridden all her life so it was natural to serenade the horses while she groomed them.
When musician Mike Walmsley of the Climax Jazz Band heard her singing in the stable, she was recruited for karaoke at the Christmas party. He and other band members lent her Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong and Maxine Sullivan records.
At age 14 she was “petrified” in her club debut at the Suisse Marmite (now The Brogue Inn) in Port Credit. It was likely her back, which was aimed at most of the audience that left the biggest impression.
The doctors at Sick Kids insisted singing was good for a girl with cystic fibrosis.
But that’s not why she sang. The music and sound of the era of 78s enraptured Alex. She started singing in the Credit River Jazz band and Hot 5 Jazzmakers and at clubs around Toronto.
When she went to university at U of T’s Erindale College breathing problems forced her to miss 18 months of school. That’s when she made the decision to pursue music full-time, a decision she’s thankful her parents fully supported.
Jeff Healey aided and abetted her early jazz education, producing the first two albums that earned her the title of Canada’s “Sweetheart of Swing.”
She’s recorded 4 more CDs, cooked up a Lickin’ Good Fried side tour of Western swing/country roots music with husband Colonel Tom Parker and haunted summer festival schedules and concert stages. The first song she published earned a National Jazz Award nomination and the last CD she did earned her a Juno nomination.
The teen who hated to ride the “short bus” in high school that confirmed you were different, wanted people to come out to hear her music, not “to look at the sick girl.”
Although the smoky bars eventually stopped her from performing, she only made her condition public because she “had this wonderful thing called a transplant and wanted to help other people get transplants.”
She’s an ongoing charitable ambassador who’s recorded a single for Hurricane Katrina victims, done videos for the CF Foundation and made a charming Christmas album, with proceeds to the Trillium Organ Donor Foundation.
Shortly after she opened for Willie Nelson at Massey Hall during the Toronto Jazz Festival, Alex had her second lung transplant.
Those lungs, once down to 33 per cent capacity are now up to 94 per cent. They sound best when they fill with the echoes of the 20s and 30s that resonate through the essential music that Alex Pangman lovingly saves, replenishes and champions.
She says thanks – to both the music and the donors who gave her second and third chances to enjoy it – by getting on stage and singing just as loudly as she can.
How appropriate.
That way the gifts that she has received, are given back to the world.
A press release for Liberty Silver’s 2010 album Groove Symphony, explains that “Liberty’s inspirations for the album revolve around the life lessons and the ups-and-downs we face in life.”
If we assume that ups-and-downs are kindling for the spirit, Liberty Silver has experienced more than her share of inspiration by adversity — which has only seemed to make her innately strong voice even stronger.
A black girl adopted as a baby into a British family in Peterborough, Liberty grew up a child out of sorts with most everything but the music that was her lifeline to joy.
She was bullied incessantly by fellow students and disrespected by teachers. When she won high school track meets, she wasn’t allowed to go to provincial championships.
When she was kicked out of Sunday school for suggesting Jesus looked like a black man, Liberty gave her own solo concerts in the church basement.
History suggests that if the congregation wanted to hear someone communing with God in a truly unique voice, they should have headed downstairs.
She bolted from her home as a pre-teen after learning she was adopted.
In one of the many remarkable turns of events that mark her life, she found herself opening for Bob Marley at Madison Square Garden’s shortly after that – as a 13-year-old.
“Music is my life,” Liberty has said. “It saved me from what I went through at a young age. There’s a purpose. Music is what was given to me.”
For someone who couldn’t win an audition to be a chorus singer in high school, she’s done pretty well for herself.
The scorecard includes a Grammy, three Junos, five Black Music Awards, a couple of Olympic theme songs and a whole lot of confusion about what type of singer she is.
If Duke Ellington was known for being “beyond category,” then Liberty Silver should be known for being beyond categories.
The industry’s always been a bit baffled about exactly where to slot her.
Her first album was jazz. She’s been Jazz Report Magazine’s Female Singer of the Year. She’s won Junos for reggae & calypso and r & b & soul. She’s headlined the Smooth Jazz Awards at LAC with George Benson. She’s had a #1 Canadian country hit.
If they can’t class her, they at least know she has class. She’s shared stages with Harry Belafonte, Aretha Franklin. B.B. King, the SOS Band, Manhattan Transfer, Maya Angelou, Natalie Cole, Mary Wells and Stevie Wonder. And with Bobby Dean Blackburn, who was inaugurated into the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame last year.
When David Foster caught her at The Blue Note one night, he recruited her to sing on the Ethiopian relief charity single Tears Are Not Enough with Canada’s musical elite. She may have been surprised to find herself in such company, but she shouldn’t have been.
Through a prodigious number of recordings, concerts, festivals and television shows, Liberty has proven she fits wherever she chooses to sing and whatever type of material she chooses to master.
With her own Mississauga home studio, where Groove Symphony was produced, Liberty controls her own career and keeps her musical integrity intact
Her Brampton-based charitable foundation allows her to teach the business of music and pass on the lessons about navigating life’s ups-and-downs to at-risk youth.
Her advice to readers of the liner notes of Groove Symphony sums up both her credo and her contribution: “Life is a gift, shine in everything you do and light the way for others.”
That’s what she’s done.
Fito Blanko was about to go on stage with Elvis Crespo to sing before 20,000 people at American Airlines Arena in Miami and 5 million more watching the Spanish People’s Choice Awards on television.
Pacing back and forth, he spotted superstar guitarist Alejandro Sanz, who’d won many Grammies, warming up.
“Señor Sanz, you have no idea who I am. I’m a little nervous – any advice you can give me?
“You’re performing right?” replied Sanz. “You’re here for a reason. You’re a professional – now go out and do what you love to do.”
Fito says it was the most inspiring thing anyone’s ever said to him.
“This guy who recorded with Beyoncé and is one of the greatest singer-songwriters of all time just called me a pro. Why am I questioning myself? Whether you’re performing for 10 people or 10,000, the energy remains the same.”
It’s the energy to perform that has always driven Fito, who remembers performing in Panama before his family moved to Canada when he was five.
Music is in his DNA. His heroes remain the many Panamanian legends whose names are not well known outside their own country.
In high school at John Cabot, Fito used the record collection he’d carefully curated to create a DJ experience no one else could offer.
“All the signs for music to be part of me happened early in my life,” he says.
Like freestyling at the Square One transit terminal with friends and having Brampton musician LaSol cruise by and hear him.
Or being at the 21 Tavern in Panama City and spotting Grammy-award winning singer Emilio Estevan and getting his phone number after an impromptu audition.
Or travelling to Miami with close collaborator Sensei Musica during Grammy week and connecting with Estevan and record company executives there, even though he was too young to legally attend the parties he talked himself into.
“I believe everything happens for a reason,” Fito says. “God puts you in certain situations that leads your path and will open doors for you.”
His “under the radar” Mississauga springboard opened doors for Fito that have led to singles on numerous Latin charts, collaborations with Drake, Crespo, Cardinal Offishall and Pitbull , an appointment as youth ambassador for the 2015 Pan American Games and a song in the Furious 7 film and soundtrack.
His music is played in clubs around the world. Fito now co-owns and leads his own music company.
It’s a cliché but it’s true – music is the international language of communication.
There were few role models in Canada for Fito growing up but he is showing others how a Latin kid who grew up in the GTA can have an international impact in a genre many Canadians don’t know well enough.
“It’s like a dream come true but I had to figure a lot of it out on my own,” he says.
It all started with the will to get up and do what he loves to do.
“I make music for people to enjoy themselves. I want to provoke some sort of motion and vibration through sound.”
His good vibrations have earned Fito Blanko a home on Mississauga’s Music Walk of Fame.
I would just like to say what an honor it is to be here to induct one of our country’s greatest performers, and my friend, Jeff Healey… a guitar genius, a voice most singers would kill for, a trumpet player who played traditional jazz with notes from the past, an actor, a DJ, a family man and a humanitarian!
I’ve known Jeff for over 25 years and we’ve played and jammed together at most of the blues bars in the GTA including many times at his club “Healey’s.” We were lucky enough to have Jeff here at the Southside Shuffle as a guest performer with Downchild as well as both of his bands ‘The Jazz Wizards’ and ‘The Jeff Healey Blues Band’.
I remember the first time I hired Jeff to be a guest at my house gig at ‘Heads or Tails’ in Etobicoke. We agreed on a price far lower than he was worth, but he said he would as long as he didn’t have to sing “Angel Eyes.” That’s why I loved Jeff so much, he never allowed his fame to keep him from playing the blues and jazz that was his passion… anytime, anywhere!
Jeff was one of the world’s great blues guitarist, which he played on his lap and in the heat of the night would stand up and bring the audience to thunderous applause. He performed with many legendary musicians including The Allman Brothers, Bonnie Rait, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Buddy Guy, BB King, ZZ Top, Eric Clapton… and of course Chuck Jackson… Sorry folks I just had to throw that one in there!
He was a jazz aficionado, with one the largest 78 Jazz collections in the world. Jeff also hosted his own radio show, ‘My Kind of Jazz’ on CBC as well as Jazz FM.91.
Jeff had a wonderful sense of humor and he and I would joke a lot on stage. I remember one night at his club, Healey’s I told him I was sorry I drank a little too much the last time I was there but thanks a lot for the ride home… the only problem was you dropped me off at the wrong house! He replied, without skipping a beat “Well, you were the one giving me the directions!”
Jeff was also a great humanitarian. He was an advocate for literacy and participated at CNIB charity events. Jeff also raised money for childhood cancer research…more specifically “Daisy’s Eye Cancer Fund”, now known as “We C Hope” or the “World Eye Cancer Fund”… this one has always been close to the family as Jeff’s son Derek was born with ‘retinoblastoma’… the same cancer that took Jeff’s eyesight. Their research and treatment is the reason Derek is healthy, has his full eyesight and is cancer free today!
At this time, I would like welcome Jeff’s family here today, his Dad, Bud, his step-mom Rose, his sister Laura, his wife Cristie and son Derek. Unfortunately, his daughter Rachel, could not be here today.
It is with great honour, that on this day, September, 10th 2016, that I welcome Jeff Healey to the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame!
Please stand to welcome Cristie and Bud as they come on stage to accept this award on Jeff’s behalf!
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.
It is my honour today to induct Clifford Gordon Hunt onto the Mississauga Walk of Fame. It was 23 years ago when I met Cliff, who looked pretty much the same as he does now only with more dark hairs than white ones.
By that time he had already established himself as a pre-eminent Canadian music mogul. Right out of high school, Cliff played in a band called The Brass Union. to be honest The Brass Union was before my time, and when I asked Cliff what their claim to fame was, he gave me one of those stares that says, maybe you shouldn’t bring up The Brass Union.
He then did what many players did when they figured out touring is grueling and went over to the business side. His first gig was sitting alongside future Rush managers Vic Wilson and Pegi Cecconi booking bands at Concept 376 which at the time was Canada’s biggest booking agency booking bands like The Guess Who, April Wine, The Stampeders, etc.
Later he worked alongside his dad as the Associate Producer of the CNE Grandstand where he worked with artists like The Beach Boys, Chicago, The Jackson 5 and Frank Sinatra. If I stopped right now, Cliff probably would have done enough to have his name added to the Walk. But Cliff had another 40 years of deals to do.
Later he managed, worked with, and did record deals some exciting acts through the years including Triumph, The Diodes, Zon, Refugee, Lydia Taylor and many others. I met Cliff in 1993 and together we managed a band signed to Warner Music called the Killjoys who went on to win the Juno for best new group.
Cliff saved his master stroke for last. In 1999, Cliff started a company called Musicrypt. The digital age was upon us and record companies were looking for a more rational solution for delivering music to radio stations.
Until Cliff came along, record labels would deliver a physical record to a courier or radio promoter and have them hand deliver a copy to the radio station music director. While incredibly personal, it was also bereft with problems. You can just imagine ego driven arguments between radio stations over who would get the new U2 song first. And what if the courier lost or worse copied the song before it was widely available?
In one grand swoop, Cliff changed all that. With Musicrypt, Cliff would deliver music instantly to all, fully, securely so that no stealing could take place, and better still open a direct channel of communication between radio station and the labels.
Cliff’s solution was widely embraced. It was not too long before Cliff’s solution was used by over 95% of the Canadian music business and widely used throughout the U.S.
Today, the company, now called YANGAROO is the world leader in music and video delivery being used North America wide as well as Europe and Latin America.
If that wasn’t enough, Cliff’s team tweaked the software to become the voting tool for The Junos, the GRAMMYS, the Emmys, the Golden Globes, the Academy of Country Music Awards, MTV Video Music Awards and the Canadian Screen Awards to name the most notables.
Cliff’s contribution to the international music community is significant. Long after he is gone – and based on his mother who is here with us I suspect that will not be for a long while, Cliff’s fingerprints will continue to be all over it. It is seldom recognized but should be a source of pride for all Mississaugans and Canadians alike.
I would like to talk for a moment about Cliff the man.
Cliff has lived his whole adult life in Mississauga, right now living just down the road in Port Credit. His two children, Adam and Shauna, both married, live nearby in Mississauga as well.
Cliff has always been proud of his Mississauga background and couldn’t be happier that his kids and his children’s children still reside in the same place. If you stop and ask anyone about Cliff, I’m sure they’d all say the same thing. He is affable, genial and never ever has anything negative to say about anyone. He is a gentleman’s gentleman. His picture is in the dictionary beside the phrase Class Act.
If the Mississauga Walk of Fame was just about accomplishments in industry, Cliff would be a shoe in. If the Mississauga Walk of Fame was only about devotion to family and community, Cliff would be a shoe in. And if the Mississauga Walk of Fame was solely about the measure of a man’s inner qualities, Cliff would be a shoe in.
With Cliff, you get a three for one. A pioneer of the entertainment business, a devoted family man and community oriented person and a class act all the way.
So it is my great honour to present to you, the newest member of the Mississauga Walk of Fame, Mr. Clifford Gordon Hunt.
Steve DeMarchi would deliver a parcel for Prestige Couriers in the late 80s and the hit single When I’m With You would come on the radio. “They’d have CHUM-AM on. The song would play and I’d say ‘that’s me on the radio.’ They’d look at me and say ‘Sure it is.’ Just put the box over in the corner, you idiot.”
It was indeed Steve playing guitar and singing on Sheriff’s 1983 #1 Canadian hit. A couple of years later the band was out of work as punk and new wave changed the musical landscape overnight.
DeMarchi and lead vocalist Freddy Curci took jobs as couriers, while they awaited the chance to deliver more hits. In the meantime, they invested $70,000 in a 16-track studio in the basement of the DeMarchi home on Avongate Dr. in Mississauga.
DeMarchi and his talented multi-instrumentalist brother Dennis and Curci recorded a whole album in case they got another chance. A group of touring music executives in town for a convention couldn’t believe how much sound the trio were able to get out of 16 tracks, when 48 was the norm for professional studios.
One day, out of the blue, Capitol Records president Dean Cameron called saying “you’re going to have a hit.”
A Las Vegas DJ had started playing When I’m With You for a guess-the-band contest. The song took flight again, climbing into the top 10.
DeMarchi and Curci quit the courier business, headed off to do multiple American radio interviews.
They hooked up with three founding members of Seattle’s Heart to form Alias, a reference to the fact they were composite version of Sheriff and Heart under another name. One of the songs they’d written at the DeMarchi home while couriers, More Than Words Can Say eventually hit #2 on Billboard’s top 100 and #1 on the adult contemporary chart.
Steve’s two biggest hits are in rotation in “classic” radio formats, have been used in numerous TV ads, including on the Super Bowl, and are part of Time/Life music compilations sold round the globe. Alias’ death was as unexpected as its birth. The record started to do well – then grunge and alt hit and the bottom fell out – again.
DeMarchi has since toured the world, working as a side musician for The Cranberries. Steve well remembers the night Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts knocked on the dressing room door to introduce themselves and say “welcome to the tour.”
He spent two years helping lead singer Dolores O’Riordan write and record her solo record, part of which was recorded at Metalworks on Mavis Rd. While Alanis Morissette was singing background vocals on a Freddy Curci cover of Brown-Eyed Girl, she asked Steve what it was like to have a #1 hit record. He got to ask her the same question a few years later at an awards show in Europe.
Steve DeMarchi has played everywhere from the Mississauga Belle, the Locomotion and Superstars in his hometown to the Vatican, where he played with The Cranberries before 200,000 people at Christmas celebrations that featured an 85-piece orchestra.
He’s also appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and more than a half-dozen times on the version hated by Jay Leno. He even played the Nobel Prize concert when he and The Cranberries shared a stage with Shania Twain and Phil Collins.
“That’s something I never would have dreamed of as a kid playing the local bars around here,” he says.
All of that has earned Steve a well-earned place on Mississauga’s Music Walk of Fame.
Every high school has a long history of wannabe rock bands. Toronto’s East York high school in the 1960s was no different. A group called Misty Blue often played school dances. One guy, the bass player, made it big in the music business.
But not in the way you think.
Neill Dixon was no Paul McCartney, but he quickly recognized his natural flair for the business side of music. He became de facto manager of his group.
When he returned to his native England to go to school, he booked acts like Donovan, and the group that would become Pink Floyd, to play at his arts college.
Back in Canada in 1967, Dixon opened a coffee house on Jarvis St. called Grumbles where he booked acts like Joni Mitchell, Ian & Sylvia, Gordon Lightfoot, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.
His music business apprenticeship continued with RCA Records in 1972, while he also booked acts for a club that had just been taken out of mothballs, the El Mocambo.
While marketing and promoting for RCA and GRT Records, Dixon developed critical contacts with agents, managers and record companies. Soon he was an A & R manager, while booking acts at the Colonial, Le Coq d’Or and The Hook & Ladder.
He often crossed paths with a band manager named Steve Propas. They formed the Dixon-Propas marketing partnership in the 70s, an alignment of stars that was recognized in 2013 when the pair won the “Pioneer Award” from Music Managers Forum Canada for their groundbreaking work, which included producing innumerable concerts at the Ontario Place Forum.
One of the groups Dixon managed was Act 3, including young guitarist Rik Emmett. When a fledgling group from Mississauga poached Emmett from the band, Dixon-Propas ended up managing his new group through their first three records and their U.S. breakthrough. “Triumph went from a bar band to an arena act in a very short period of time,” says Dixon. He had more than a little something to do with that.
While Triumph was able to get a record contract stateside, other groups in the Dixon-Propas stable weren’t so fortunate.
That’s why they formed the prophetically-named and highly-successful “Solid Gold Records” which broke numerous Canadian bands in the U.S., such as Chilliwack.
In the early 80s, a weekly music tip sheet called The Record started an annual convention to build its circulation and credibility. Dixon’s company, Chart Toppers, was hired in 1983 to put it together. It was a match made in musical heaven.
Neill’s extensive network of contacts in all aspects of the business, his penchant for innovation and his ability to exploit emerging trends made him the perfect match for the job. Thirty-four years later, it’s now the industry powerhouse known as Canadian Music Week. Dixon became a partner two years after it began, swallowed the publication that initiated it in the early 90s, added the attached musical festival in 1991 and guided it safely through astounding changes that have transformed it – and the industry it serves – multiple times.
Like its patriarch, it has always been on the cutting edge. After almost three-and-a-half decades of producing the showcase – Canadian Music Week and Neill Dixon – are all but synonymous. As the record business morphed into the fragmented and downsized “music business” we see today, Dixon never forgot one simple fact: it’s ultimately “all about the song.”
“Bands can always tell if you’re just a guy in a suit or if you’re on their side,” he says. “I think I’ve been successful because I have an artist’s mentality.” An artist’s mentality and a natural business acumen will get you a lot of things, including a nameplate on Mississauga’s Music Walk of Fame.
Rob Wells has been in the studio with some of the most famous musicians in the world, but it’s the tinkling from behind Westacres Public School that really get his musical motor running. It may not be the Justin Bieber or the Ish or the Nelly Furtado or the Olivia Newton-John or the Selena Gomez product that he’s shaped for the public – but it cuts to the heart of what music is really all about.
Over the past few years, Rob has hosted a Songwriters’ Circle where some of his musical playmates, like Randy Bachman and Matt Dusk, drop by to play at an annual concert. The proceeds go to his local school in Applewood Acres to support and sustain its music program. Rob’s personal interest has helped support, sustain and inflame students’ passion for the pursuit that is his life’s work.
“Music is related to so many different aspects of life,” he says, noting that Albert Einstein, who played violin and piano, insisted that the theory of relativity was a “musical thought.” He’s not the first one to notice that “math, patience, focus, listening skills, give-and-take, and response” all seem to be intimately connected to music. That’s why walking by West Acres and hearing kids banging on bongos or pummelling the xylophone gives him such a thrill.
Some of those kids would be thrilled themselves to know that Wells and his engineering co-conspirator Chris Anderson worked with Justin Bieber not far away from the school to produce My Worlds Acoustic, an unplugged album of songs from Justin’s first two albums.
Rob was a mild-mannered computer animator, writing songs for himself in his spare time until he attended a game-changing one week songwriters’ course with 40 other would-be musicians at Metalworks Studio in 2001. He went from “incredibly nervous” the first day to “depressed” on the last – not because his dream was shattered but because the course was over.
The rest, as they say, is history. Wells, like his brother Rob, is a highly sought-after writer, producer, player and collaborator who works with many of the best-known contemporary acts in the business.
He thrives under the pressure of going into the studio in the morning with an idea and, in collaboration with the artist and lyricist and the rest of the band, emerging with a completed product. “By the end of the day you have a track and people are freaking out about it – that’s the best.” The writing is still the best part of the job. “It soothes my soul… lowers my blood pressure. It’s the best therapy of all time.”
His music has appeared in countless TV shows, film scores and too many CDs to count. He’s doing the new Katharine McPhee album in Hollywood and writing for the new Degrassi series on Netflix. If you walk into the new dinosaur museum in Calgary and catch the epic chase scene that greets you, listen carefully to the chase music. That was written by Rob.
From dinosaurs to Daisy Dares You, Wells has it covered.
It was 2003 when Rob first heard one of his songs on the radio. It was Craig Smart singing What Went On. That’s when he says he first thought, “Wow, I can do this.” Wow, can he ever.
Welcome to the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame Rob.
When John and Michelle Phillips decided they wanted to start a band in the early 60s, they thought first of a guy – or rather the voice of a guy – that they’d heard sing while they were on a Hootenanny tour in the southern U.S.
They’d heard that his group, the Halifax 3, had just broken up. The Phillips’ put out word that they wanted to get in touch.
Not long after, Denny Doherty showed up on their doorstep. They sang together that day and by the end of it, the Phillips’ knew they had the foundation of their new group. “Denny’s voice really was what started to create a sound we loved,” Michelle said in a documentary made for PBS to celebrate the beautifully layered harmonies of the Mamas and the Papas 40 years later.
It was Doherty who lobbied John to have his friend Cass Elliot join the group to create what he called “Harvey — the 5th voice that was created when the four of us sang together.”
Coupled with John’s imaginative songs, they created the blend of nuanced harmonies and stunning vocal arrangements that earned the Mamas and Papas a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. The group only lasted two-and-a-half years, but nothing evokes the 60s era of love and peace and San Francisco quite as quickly as their California sound.
Doherty was a coastal guy, all right, an East coast guy originally from the Maritimes. When musical work dried up in Halifax in the mid-80s and a bunch of his peers moved to the GTA, he moved his family to Mississauga because he’d heard it was a great place to raise kids. He lived here until his sudden – and far too early death – in 2007 at age 66.
He wrote much of Dream a Little Dream, the Nearly True Story of the Mamas and Papas, in Mississauga. It is still running in periodic stage productions in Canada and the U.S. Doherty also became a star to a new generation of kids. When he went to Clarkson Village for ice cream at his favourite Baskins and Robbins, he’d often be recognized by the toddlers first – as the Harbour Master from the Theodore Tugboat CBC-TV series.
Then their mothers would recognize him as an old rock ‘n roller. He would be heartened to know that his two grandchildren still enjoy watching Theodore Tugboat, or “the grandpa show” as it’s known in their household.
The Doherty homes in Park Royal and, later in Lorne Park, were filled with friends, music, laughter and story-telling, especially by the patriarch of the house who was a master of the art.
Although most people would associate his voice with the opening strains of Monday, Monday or the line “All the leaves are gone” from California Dreamin’, Doherty’s favourite Mamas and Papas’ song was a ballad called Dancing Bear which shows off his legendary voice in its purest form.
John Phillips had long recognized the magic of the Doherty sound. He not only wrote great songs for it but he acknowledged it when he penned a short musical selfie of the group called Creeque Alley.
It provides a fitting epitaph for that special timbre: “Denny, you know there aren’t many – Who can sing a song the way that you do.” There certainly were not.
It’s a pleasure to add Denny Doherty’s name today to the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame.
When John Bride talks about his career, he makes it sound as if he was over his head in most of those formative musical groups he played in and which are part of the rich musical heritage of Mississauga and Toronto in the 1960s and 70s.
From the time he formed his first band, called the Odds ‘n Ends, at Clarkson’s Hillcrest Public School, John was always looking forward, moving on to bigger and better bands.
In high school, he started Papa Grey, which rehearsed at a house just up Stavebank Rd. from here, then joined Brutus, which briefly transformed into The Ugly Ducklings when that group’s lead singer Dave Bingham joined up. Then John won an audition to play with a group of older guys in Greaseball Boogie Band. “What have I gotten myself into?” he wondered when he saw the mock fights onstage and the lead singer eating a tube of Brylcreem a night to impress Greaseball’s fans.
He may not have been ready for their burlesque antics, but he was always ready to learn, stretch and extend his musical command.
Greaseball Boogie Band became Shooter which had a hit with a song he hates called I Can Dance. Then he and Ray Harrison created the consummate blues collar band playing out of the Cameo Lounge at the Hotel Isabella. John gave the Cameo Blues Band its name and a signature sound, with his highlight reel Fender Strat style.
Whether playing with the Partland Brothers, Cheryl Lescomb, Rita Chiarelli or Amanda Marshall, co-hosting weekly jams for years at the Fox ‘n Fiddle, or becoming a Monday night musical mainstay at The Harp with Tom Barlow, John Bride has always kept maturing as a player.
As Chuck Jackson, his old friend and former partner in the Jackson-Bride Band says, “John brings a band to life. It’s just like when you hear Otis Redding or Sam Cooke sing, when you hear that guitar, you know right away, it’s John Bride.”
“He commands that stage. Any band he plays with, he takes them up another notch.” John Bride is the epitome of the local guitar legend.
He knows the whole catalogue, handles every genre, has played all the venues, from the local high school gyms to the outdoor stadiums on bills with The Beach Boys and The Moody Blues, has opened for Ray Charles at Massey Hall – twice – is on a ton of great records and, best of all for us locals, can still be heard plying his craft weekly in Port Credit bars.
He knows his instrument, teaches his instrument, fixes his instrument for the lots of famous players – most of whom he prefers not to name – and lives his instrument. He got famous around town as a teen for playing a killer version of Robert Johnson’s venerable song Crossroad Blues.
With apologies to Mr. Johnson, when John Bride went down to The Crossroads and fell down on his knees, he asked the Lord for mercy and the Lord said – first – play the guitar please.
Welcome to the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame John.
For 36 years, Canada had a Friday night TV date with a lanky troubadour who lived in Mississauga. His name was Tommy Hunter and his game was country music.
He didn’t have hit records. He didn’t dance. He hardly ever wore sequins. He didn’t yodel. All he did was invite a nation onto his front stoop and his back parlour, assemble some friends to sing some familiar songs, get everybody to relax and then entertain them like crazy.
He was that most Canadian of celebrities, a star without apparent ego. He really didn’t need one because he put us all at ease right away, from the cream of the superstar country crop in Nashville to an impossibly young Eileen Edwards — later to become Shania somebody-or-other — making her national TV debut.
The collective blood pressure of the nation started dropping mid-evening as 10 per cent of the country tuned in to see what small pleasures Canada’s “Country Gentleman” had for us this week.
Despite an endless parade of producers who wanted to modernize him, gussy him up and turn him into a showcase for the latest musical trend, Hunter knew his audience well and knew that they wanted the real goods he was delivering – honest music delivered in an honest way.
“I don’t want any hot-shot material,” he once told an interviewer. “When a new writer comes along and says he wants to write comedy, I tell him he’s got learn how to write, “Hello folks,how are you tonight?”
When his audience tuned in, they “wanted to feel like they were putting on an old slipper,” Tommy says. Our feet have never been in such comfortable hands.
They called it The Tommy Hunter Show but they could just as easily have called it what they named a later CBC show — Heartland — because that’s where he touched this country. The show was a kind of regional religion in parts of Canada that otherwise had little in common.
That’s why, when Tommy went out to play the legion halls and churches and community theatres across this land, the public flocked to see him.
Over its lengthy existence, The Tommy Hunter Show had a consistency of character — the host’s character — genial and exuberant and gentle on our minds.
He has a special place in our local history because he wrote our theme song, “Mississauga” when the municipality was incorporated as a city 40 years ago. He even had the foresight to use the future mayor on backing vocals.
The song was his idea and he guided the whole process, getting the studio for free; collecting Mississaugans from all walks of life; putting them on a bus downtown; and making them an integral part of the recording party.
If Tommy Hunter’s one-time background vocalist is known as the “people’s mayor,” then surely Tommy himself should be known as the “people’s troubadour.”
The chorus of his civic theme song urged the listener to “Come on out to Mississauga, it’s the greatest place we know.”
It’s advice the rest of the country should heed — simply because it’s coming from arguably the greatest example of a home-grown, natural story-telling entertainer Canada will ever have the pleasure to know.
Welcome to the Mississauga Walk of Fame, Tommy.
His fascination with music started as a four-year-old singing in the choir in Toronto. As a teen, he developed an uncanny ear for finding songs with staying power. He was a high school hit-picker for CHUM, then wrote the first “pick the hits” column for the Toronto Star. He DJed dances at almost every high school in Toronto, then started Canadian Bandstand 63, where he played tunes his fellow teens flocked to hear. Gordon Lightfoot was his first “live” entertainment , lip-syncing his first single.
He was the youngest music director ever in Canada when Foster Hewitt hired him at CKFH, where he broke songs like Born to be Wild by Steppenwolf. That group used to be called Jack London and the Sparrow when Joey was occasionally their guest singer in Yorkville.
It was an era when music programmers Frank Gould at Montreal’s CFOX, Nevin Grant at Hamilton’s CKOC, Rosalie Tremblay at Windsor’s CKLW and Joey Cee chose the theme songs for Canada’s musical coming-of-age parties. The last time somebody else paid him a regular cheque was when he left radio in 1970.
“I have to create things because I need to survive,” he says, “and I have to pull out all the stops.”
And, my, how many stops he has pulled. He’s written hit songs and sung a few. He published Record Week for three years — it was printed at Sam McCallion’s presses on Falconer Dr. He’s published HOToronto Magazine for two decades, owned an art gallery, emceed for Neil Diamond, The Who, Tina Turner, BTO and many more, owned and operated his own record label, Nightflite; produced a record album for Playboy Magazine owner Hugh Hefner; published concert books, set up a celebratory “Canada Day” in Los Angeles; been a Juno judge, co-ordinated Toronto’s Chocolate Ball and Chocolate festival; and has been associate director of the Beaches Jazz Festival for 26 years.
When he published Record Week his fiercest competitors were Walt Grealis and Stan Klees, who ran RPM Magazine and established the Junos. Years later, they honoured him with the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame Award. “When you came along, you lit a fire under us,” Grealis explained.
Since 1986, he’s run most of these ventures from his Erin Mills home. As promotion manager for Heartbreakers nightclub in the city centre, he established the first Mississauga Talent Search contest and pioneered the concept of all age dances, since widely duplicated. And he’s helped put on numerous local charity shows, including the Rainbow Ball and mentored about 100 interns, many of whom now work in the music business. And he knows a thing or two about walks of fame.
He nominated Norman Jewison for his spot on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Blvd. He tried but failed to find backers for a Walk of Fame in Toronto, a decade before it became a reality.
He’s usually the guy organizing the Walk of Fame ceremonies but today Joey Cee can add a new innovation to his resume — first time being on the receiving end of a Walk of Fame induction.
Congratulations Joey.
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.
After watching a student talent showcase at Mount Carmel Secondary School in the spring of 1993 featuring three school bands, English teacher David Rogers had an idea.
What if the three standout guys who were in the band called To Each His Own hooked up with the standout guitarist in the band Dragonflower? He planted the idea with them and, sure enough, over the summer Ben Kowalewicz (Ko-wall-a-witz) Aaron Solowoniuk (Sol-won-ee-yuk) and Jon Gallant got together with Ian D’Sa to see what would happen.
What happened was an instantaneous musical bond. The energy and mutual admiration were immediate. One of the first songs they played was a Neil Young’ cover. It was supposed to be practice, but Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World turned out to be prophecy.
Even though it was a mixed marriage — two of them were from Meadowvale and two were from Streetsville — the guys made it work. There was no punk-pop scene in Mississauga at the time, so they all but created one themselves, turning Friday nights at the Masonic Lodge in Streetsville into a pilgrimage for every angst-ridden teen in town with a sense of musical adventure. And they gained a reputation — which they’ve never lost — for delivering the real goods onstage.
Whether it was upstaging the headliners at Jingle Bell Rock 4 at Mt. Carmel or playing for a few friends and family at a billiards joint in Lakeview, the guys in Pezz — which became Billy Talent to the rest of the world — were totally committed to the energetic execution of their musical vision on stage.
They wanted desperately to get better and better — and they did. That they played with the same energy and commitment and edge in front of 100 kids in the basement of the Masonic Lodge in the late 1990s as they did in front of 100,000 people at the Rock Am Ring concert in Germany last year, is a mark of their high personal standards of excellence.
Their songs have evolved rhythmically, lyrically, melodically and harmonically over the years, but the nuclear musical fission at their core remains intact.
After a decade of hard-slogging, they became “overnight” successes. While they can now measure their success in terms of millions in sales, and international tours, and media coverage, and awards (seven Junos and nine MuchMusic video awards and counting), they prefer to measure it in terms of their own musical evolution. Which is ongoing.
In introducing their Mississauga forerunners, Triumph at an induction ceremony last year, Ian said “as artists they showed the world time and time again how to give bigger-than-life performances. And they showed the value of really connecting with their fans.”
He might just as well have been speaking of Billy Talent. Despite their huge successes, the band members are very much still the same Toronto Maple Leaf-loving, neighbourhood pub types that they were when they started out. They’re a “friends and family” band for the punk set. From their first gig in Ian’s parents’ basement in Meadowvale to their appearance yesterday before thousands at Riot Fest in Downsview Park, Billy Talent has rocked the talk.
And — now that they’ll have their very own stone — they’ll be able to rock the walk on the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame.
Congratulations Aaron, Ben, Jon and Ian!
When Rik Emmett’s grandfather gave him an acoustic guitar as a child — one of the ones you ordered out of the catalogue — it wasn’t the hula girl and the palm trees stencilled on the front that enthralled his grandson. It was the sound it produced and the possibility of creating something that was unique and personal.
He’d barely learned to play two chords when the pre-teen wrote his first song. It was undoubtedly heavily influenced by those Beatles tunes he and his buddies lip-synced to as they strummed their tennis racquets and listened to Twist and Shout on an old Seabreeze record player.
That was the start of a musical journey that has taken Emmett from school auditoriums to some of the world’s biggest outdoor concert venues and back to the human-scaled concerts that his fans can now order up in their own local communities by going to his website and requesting his presence in their community.
And while the world may still want to measure him by the keening vocals, smoking lead guitar licks and driving rock and roll anthems he wrote with a Mississauga hard rock trio that went viral before viral was invented, Emmett has shown over and over throughout his long and enduring musical career that it is his own muse that he continues to chase — not anyone else’s pre-conceived idea of who he is or what he should play.
Under the spandex and makeup and that shock of blond hair in the 1970s was one very serious musician. This we have all learned — to our delight — as his eclectic tastes in guitar and musical styles have unfolded before our eyes in so many memorable musical releases over the years.
This is a thinking, inquisitive WORKING musician who has never stopped perfecting his craft. After the early Triumphant years, Emmett found himself on Middle Ground, you might say, between a rock band and a hard place.
Unlike so many contemporaries — long since forgotten — who put their imaginations on “repeat” by perfecting endless variations on the riff that made them famous, Emmett has always moved restlessly into new and adventurous directions. He founded a record label and the first thing he issued on it featured classical guitar, with the finger style guitar pieces he’d always wanted to highlight in that format.
When he hooked up with Dave Dunlop to explore the sound of dual guitars in the group called Stringed Troubadours, the powers that be determined that the result was “smooth jazz.”
So, since another new “demographic pigeonhole,” — as he terms labels given to various musical genres — had been created to stick him in, he went with the flow, at least for a while.
He hired an expert rhythm section for a new CD, chiselled off the harder edges and sailed his way to a bunch more “Smooth Jazz” awards. But no category can hold Emmett for long. “I’m very uncomfortable listening to old recordings I’ve made,” he once said. “I am always interested in the NEXT song I’m working on, the next project coming down the pipe.” I’m sure he agrees with the wise assessment of American bandleader Duke Ellington who said there are only two kinds of music – good and bad. It’s quite clear the kind of music he has made, no matter what the label, and it is all good.
The thrill of sitting down with a guitar and his imagination and making some musical magic hasn’t lost any of its charm, all these years after he received his first guitar.
As he told one interviewer, “The thing that is still the most satisfying aspect of self-expression is to sit down with an acoustic, create, write, then sing & play something that I wrote myself. Even the anthems that filled arenas for Triumph can be boiled down to simple acoustic folk songs, which is how they started life anyway. I know that my career ‘reputation’ is probably more one of ‘guitarist’ – but the truth is, I’m one of those dreaded multiple-slash kinds of people – guitarist/singer/songwriter (add producer/arranger/recording artist into that mix), and it’s all just one big ball of wax.” And what a wondrous big ball of wax it has been.
You could say that Rik Emmett started his career in Triumph and worked his way back to Respect — one solid record at a time. He may have described himself best in a couple of lines from one his best-known songs, Ordinary Man, when he wrote:
“I will not be a puppet. I cannot play it safe. I’ll give myself away, with a blind and simple faith.” Emmett hasn’t played it safe and he has paid simple faith to the music be believes in.
And we are all very grateful that he has given so much of himself away to us, in so many lovely and different forms, through the years.
Trust and the music business are too often mutually exclusive things. Many bitter artists would say that the concept of “ trust in the music business” is an oxymoron — like truth in advertising. Yet a man we honour here today built a long and fruitful career based on that enduring concept.
Charlie Camilleri was a pivotal figure in the Canadian music business during his exemplary 30-year career at CBS Records. Rejecting a chance to manage American pop star Gene Pitney in the 1960s, Camilleri stayed home with his young family in Mississauga and, instead, paved the way for several generations of performers to make their marks in this country.
From Mississauga Music Walk of Fame inaugural inductee Ronnie Hawkins, to Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tony Bennett, rock group Chicago, Tom Jones, Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Springsteen and Wynton Marsalis — on to Celine Dion who he helped introduce to an English Canadian audience through one of the many Variety Club telethons he helped organize — Charlie Camilleri was a key go-to guy if you wanted a musical career in this country.
He knew everyone in the business and he respected and worked with them to foster their careers. Larry LeBlanc, the veteran music writer who won an honourary Juno last year, says Camilleri was a musical “Everyman” in the 60s and 70s when the industry was relatively small. He did print and radio promotion for artists, visited retailers, picked up the acts at the airport and got them safely to the hotel.
He was also the artist’s surrogate family when they were in town. Camilleri’s gregarious personality and his common touch meant he became very close to the artists. “Charlie seemed to know everybody,” says LeBlanc. “Other people showboated. Charlie did things quietly, but he did things.”
When the extraordinarily talented and extraordinarily eccentric Glenn Gould was on CBS, there was only one man at the record company he would regularly talk to. As as happened with so many of the artists he handled, Charlie’s business relationship turned into a personal one. Every Christmas, a call would come into the Camilleri household in Lakeview from Gould and there would be a long conversation about everything under the sun.
Many of the artists dropped into the Camilleri household to have supper, often before they worked the CNE summer shows. And Camilleri’s personal service often included hitting the road with the artists. He travelled the Canadian circuit with Johnny Cash, one of many who became a close friend.
But it wasn’t just the big name international stars Camilleri promoted. He helped build homegrown careers for artists like Kelly Jay and Crowbar, Larry Gowan and Burton Cummings.
When he retired, CBS named a major internal award for Charlie. CBS Nashville honoured him. Legendary promoter Michael Cohl gave him a lifetime backstage pass for any Concert Productions international show. The founders of the Juno Awards Walt Grealis and Stan Klees of RPM Magazine made Camilleri the first inductee into their planned Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame.
At the same time he built his legendary professional career, Camilleri was creating a volunteer profile that was almost as impressive. A lifetime supporter of local sports and community projects, Camilleri coached Cawthra baseball and hockey and partnered with Eve Petrescue to build the local human infrastructure in Lakeview that made them work.
His charity of choice was Variety Club. He personally sponsored Tony Bennett into the local chapter and he raised millions of dollars in more than 25 years of involvement with Variety Village. Camilleri made Variety Club the charity of choice for the music industry for many years.
His work earned him the highest honour he could receive from the International Club and the highest he could receive from the Canadian organization, its Heart Award. On the inscription, the group said the award proved that contrary to Leo Durocher’s belief, nice guys can finish first.
Along the way, he also won Grey Cups in 1946 and 47 with The Toronto Argonauts and won the 1950 Canadian softball championship. After his retirement, he was a pivotal figure in keeping the Argo alumni club active.
When you think about the giants of the Canadian music business, Charlie Camilleri’s name won’t be the first you come up with. Or the second or the third.
But his name belongs among the elite. He used his talent for promotion and friendship to foster a fledgling industry and help build it into the powerhouse it became in his time. And he did it all with charm and grace that belied the reputation of the industry he worked in.
It is our pleasure today to add his name to the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame.
The 2008 National Jazz Awards ceremony, held at the Palais Royale in Toronto, was a bittersweet affair for jazz fans from Mississauga. The program included a posthumous tribute to three jazz giants who had all lived in Mississauga at one time in their lives. The three were the incomparable pianist Oscar Peterson who was inducted into the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame last year, guitarist and jazz historian Jeff Healey and Doug Riley, the talented writer and pianist who founded and led the group called Dr. Music.
But while the Canadian jazz community paid tribute to those late lions that night, they also recognized another Mississauga musician, one who had five previous National Jazz Awards nominations. That was the night that Nancy Walker was honoured as Canadian Keyboardist of the Year.
When I spoke to Nancy the next day about winning the award, she was typically humble. First, she made it absolutely clear she does NOT consider music appreciation to be a competitive sport. Then she made it clear that any one of the other nominees – who were a stellar group — made up of David Braid, Robi Botos, David Restivo and David Virelles would have been just as worthy a winner.
In fact she pointed out that all of them “have awesome technique, much more so than I do.” But then she added something very telling: “sometimes it’s more a matter of people being moved by your playing on an emotional level.”
Indeed.
If you look at the reviews of Nancy’s half-dozen CDs, issued roughly every three years since 1997, you will see her playing described as “instinctual, strong, expressive, full-bodied, contemporary, probing, contemplative, angular, harmonically savvy, lyrical and intrepid,” to name just a few of the adjectives that professional critics have used to try to pin her down.
“She’s very imaginative and dedicated to what she’s doing,” says her colleague Rosemary Galloway with whom she plays in the Jane Fair/Rosemary Galloway quintet. “Her style evolves constantly and it is a signature that is clearly her own. She seems to always be listening and collaborating with different players — so she’s always expanding her horizons.”
Nancy was born and lived in Montreal until the age of seven when her family moved to Oakville. She was always keen on music but as is so often the case, an inspirational teacher took a special interest in her talent and really incited her passion for it.
His name was John Macdonald. He taught at Blakelock Secondary School by day but was also a successful pianist and arranger who had worked with the likes of Rick Wilkins and Rob McConnell.
Nancy played trumpet at the time but showed early interest in composition. Even in those days, she had big musical ambitions. She wrote an original composition for a 60-piece concert band. Although to quote Nancy, she “didn’t have a clue” about what she was doing, Mr. Macdonald ignored all the technical flaws and just said “let’s play it.” And it was performed in school concerts twice.
Although she had been accepted to Boston’s Berklee School of Music on trumpet, Nancy decided she didn’t have the stamina for that instrument and switched to piano when she enrolled in the Humber College jazz program. When she graduated, she started working right away in the cocktail lounges, bars and travelling show bands that were so much more plentiful in Toronto in the 1980s.
Then began a musical apprenticeship that saw her play with everyone from The Parachute Club, to Raffi, to Sylvia Tyson. She travelled all over Europe with Roger Whittaker’s show, including several stints in Germany where he was particularly popular.
It was at that point in her career she met her future husband, outstanding bassist Kieran Overs, who already had an established career in jazz. Nancy recorded her first CD, Invitation, in 1997 and has shown a steady progression in every recorded venture since. Making, financing and distributing CDs in this age is not easy but Nancy has made sure that there is a body of work extant that clearly documents her artistic growth.
In 2003, she won the prestigious Grand Prix de Jazz at the Montreal International Jazz Festival which landed her a contract with Canada’s premier jazz label, Justin Time Records and led to distribution deals in the U.S. and Europe. That record, When She Dreams, is a poignant tribute to her mother Yvonne and includes some of Nancy’s loveliest and most sensitive pieces.
Nancy has recorded with many of Canada’s best jazz artists, is a festival regular who co-hosted the late-night jam sessions at the Ottawa Jazz festivals for years, was nominated for a Juno in 2006 for one of her “side” projects, works in several groups beside her own trio and is an adjunct professor at her alma mater, Humber College.
She is a professional student in the best sense of that term who has studied with Fred Hersch, Jason Moran and Myra Melford. Her writing is melodically, harmonically and rhythmically complex. Her colleague and friend Chris Chahley says Nancy’s work – quote – “is challenging to players and listeners. It’s often difficult music that requires attention.”
He points out that “she is comfortable in so many differentcontexts. She is such a sensitive player. She can really feel what’s going on and support it. She has that uncanny sense to play the right thing at the right time.”
And as she has matured Chris says she has developed a “unique sound and touch which is one of the indications of a musician who has truly found her voice.”
Her last CD, New Hieroglyphics showcases that compelling voice in a variety of contexts and is the work of the mature artist at the top of her game. It deserved the universally rave reviews it received. The first time I ever interviewed Nancy, I mentioned to her jokingly that she wasn’t the only talented piano player from Montreal who happened to live in Mississauga.
The words were barely out of my mouth when she responded, “I wouldn’t put myself in the same sentence with Oscar Peterson.” He was, of course, in a class by himself in so many ways.
But there is absolutely no doubt that Nancy Walker is one of the best pianists, and best players in this country.
She may not put herself in the same sentence with Oscar Peterson, but Nancy’s going to have to get used to the fact that she does richly deserve the spot of honour — near Oscar’s — which she will receive today on the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame.
Despite what some people might tell you, the Southside Shuffle was not born 15 years ago at the St. Lawrence soccer fields at the foot of Hurontario St., where Downchild and Fathead held forth for a small but enthusiastic crowd.
It actually started many years before that, in a house at the foot of Mississauga Rd. — in what is now J.C. Saddington Park — the house where Chuck Jackson’s grandparents lived. That’s where the ritual gatherings of the clan took place, often on Sunday afternoons. Everyone grabbed an instrument and took a featured spot on the musical bill of fare.
Brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts, parents, and grandparents played various instruments, mostly guitars — Chuck probably plucked away on his first bass purchased from the Dixie Music Centre in Dixie Mall — and his grandfather played spoons.
It was a musical mishmash full of mayhem and fun and a lesson in the collective joy of making music which Jackson tucked away in his fertile Credit River delta memory banks.
In fact, it could have been the inspiration for a memorable song he wrote many years later called “Dew Drop In.” There was another ritual that took place at Jackson homestead every fall — a giant family corn roast. When Chuck started the Shuffle in 1999, he made sure it was scheduled for September, in honour of his grandparents. This twin divinity of family and music is what the Southside Shuffle has always been about and what it remains about today.
Chuck Jackson lived the first 56 years of his life in Lakeview and Port Credit. His musical education got a big boost in Grade 5 at Forest Ave. Public School when the regular music teacher took a leave of absence. The substitute just happened to be the guitar player in a great Toronto band – Robbie Lane and The Disciples.
It wasn’t long before Chuck and four of his buddies formed a band they called Barewires. A couple of years later they hit the big time – playing the afternoon school dances in Grade 7 and 8. Port Credit Secondary School brought more bands – Full House, the Madison Street Walkers – and a new awakening.
At 16, he had the life-changing experience of seeing Buddy Guy in the flesh at the CNE. In 2007, Chuck would bag one of his biggest catches ever for Southside when he got Guy to agree to be in his lineup.
The same year that he saw Buddy play at the CNE, his buddy Angus McKie (Mac-Eye) went on holiday in England and returned with two records more precious than gold — an album by John Mayall and The Bluesbreakers and a song that had yet to be released in North America called Sunshine of Your Love by some new group called Cream. That really solidified Chuck’s love of the blues.
Pretty soon he hit the road — Dixie Rd. At a talent show at Dixie Mall in 1971, the judges — the well-known local group of Edward Harding and McLean — placed Chuck’s band first. They won a recording contract with Stop 8 Music and the resulting album, Get On Up with Dancer, captured the first-ever appearance of a Chuck Jackson vocal on vinyl. If you have a copy — or even better if you have it on eight-track — Chuck will be happy to sign it for you later!
Greater glory awaited on Dominion Day in 1972. Chuck and the band headlined at the A & W drive-in on Lakeshore Rd. at Front St. – near where the Starbucks now stands. The sound and light man for the show, by the way, was a kid from Erindale Woodlands named Gil Moore.
Jackson earned his stripes on the road with an r & b tribute band that played on the east coast before he joined the Cameo Blues Band in 1978. Two-and-a-half years as the house band at the Isabella Hotel refined the vocal and harmonica styles.
You pretty well know the rest of the story. He joined Canada’s premier blues band Downchild 24 years ago and is now their longest-serving vocalist.
He has flipped, flopped and flown his way to three Juno nominations, three Maple Blues Awards, the Toronto Blues Society’s Blues With a Feeling lifetime achievement award and innumerable other industry markers. Last year he was enshrined in Festival and Events Ontario’s Hall of Fame for his work founding and directing the Shuffle.
As brilliant as he has been over his long career as an artist, his work as artistic director of the Shuffle may be Chuck’s greatest achievement. He has created a vibrant, elastic, living/ breathing blues and jazz festival that has stood the test of time.
He has “borrowed” liberally from the best of the ideas he has seen playing festivals around the world and brought it all back home. The festival has changed with economic times. The big ticket main stage draws have been refined to a much more democratic, and much more accessible, regime.
For $10, you get a front-row weekend seat to the best musical entertainment that Chuck Jackson’s imagination can find. Some of the kindest words that ever fall on Chuck’s ear come from visitors who say, “man, those guys are good. I’ve never heard of them before.” That’s a tribute, of course, to his keen eye for talent.
Whether he’s singing for thousands of people at a festival or doing his weekly Sunday afternoon gig at Roc n Docs, Chuck Jackson “sits right down and cries the blues” with the same fervent commitment. When Chuck sings the blues, they stay sung. And when he founds a blues festival, it stays sound.
Memorial Park has always been central to Chuck’s life. He played ball here as a kid. He hung out with the hippies here in the 60s and he first learned to play the harp on a bench here. It’s a big part of who he is and through his efforts it’s now part of who we ALL are as a city and as a musical community. Chuck says that the Shuffle has now taken on a life of its own. In his words — “ the event itself has become the star.” Perhaps so. But if that’s so, it’s largely because of Chuck’s passion, his persistence and his perspiration.
The Southside Shuffle only became a star because one man had a vision of what it could become. It’s only fitting that Chuck Jackson’s name should find a permanent home in the park that shaped his life so vividly. He changed the park and the town forever when he first called the blues home to Port Credit — and made Port Credit the home of the blues.
Before Eleanor Calbes, the role of Liat in Rogers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific was a minor speaking part. But when the producers of the 1965 show, overseen by Richard Rodgers himself, heard Eleanor sing as they rehearsed it for the New York City Centre, they came up with an idea.
Why not unleash that amazing vocal instrument on a reprise of Bali H’ai — the song of mystery and enticement that promises that place on the horizon where you can find, “your own special hopes/ your own special dreams.” That way the beautiful song could be reintroduced again later in the show. So the great man himself, Richard Rodgers, was summoned to hear Eleanor sing.
After listening to that sensational young voice sing just a few bars of the tune, Rodgers gave the thumbs up and the role of Liat was now a singing one — with a signature song.
Eleanor Calbes became the first soloist to perform Bali H’ai — and Liat’s longing for that magical place has resonated through every subsequent production of South Pacific. Such is the power of a special voice, and the influence of a special person.
Eleanor Calbes was born in the Philippines in 1940 and began singing in the church in the small town of Aparri where she was born. Blessed with the talent to dance and act as well as sing, Calbes was heard by conductor Nicholas Goldschmidt while on tour. She was riding a bus in Hawaii with the company when it was announced that there was a telegram from Goldschmidt. The bus fell silent as it was revealed that Calbes was being offered a scholarship at the Royal Conservatory Opera School in Toronto. Then the loud cheering began.
Without the means to get to Canada or to live here once she arrived, a determined Calbes set to work. She enlisted the aid of the Philippines Chamber of Commerce in Hawaii, which offered her money for the flight to Canada in return for three free concerts on the islands.
While on that concert tour, her story became public. Once people heard the magnificent voice that was being given an opportunity of a lifetime, perfect strangers helped send her on her way with the spending money she needed.
In Canada she made her mark with the Canadian Opera Company before moving on to Broadway where she performed in The King and I and Lovely Ladies and Gentlemen. She sang the part of Liat in Toronto productions of South Pacific, at the Lincoln Centre and made an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
Her resumé includes performances of Maria in West Side Story in Germany, a command performance for Prince Philip with pianist Victor Borge and concerts in the Great Hall of China. She has performed in The Philippines numerous times, including the premiere of the opera The Black Wolf and a final concert in 2005 with President Gloria Arroyo on hand.
After moving to Mississauga, Eleanor Calbes wasted no time immersing herself in the local artistic community. She became a one-woman building crew for musical theatre in this city and environs. In fact, she really introduced the city to opera, founding the Mississauga City Centre Opera in 1985. Opera thrived here under her watch.
She staged Fiddler on the Roof soon after Meadowvale Theatre opened in the late 1980s and sang the lead role in Madama Butterfly in 1991. Mississauga’s Musician of the Year in 1986, Calbes opened her renowned voice studio four years later.
Her impeccable professional credentials aside, Calbes’ greatest gift to music in Mississauga may be her talent for teaching. “She has a real ability to draw people in and challenge them,” her friend Paul Fletcher says. “She expects more of people than they expect of themselves.”
Example — she put Fletcher’s then 14-year-old daughter Kelly in charge of choreographing a production of Oklahoma at Meadowvale — much to her surprise. Something must have worked as Kelly is now associate choreographer of We Will Rock You in New York.
As Calbes’ own career wound down, she has helped numerous others launch theirs. Her students have worked, and are working, at Stratford, Charlottetown, the Shaw Festival, on Broadway and in London’s West End. They returned en masse to pay tribute to Calbes at her farewell concert last September and the genuine outpouring of love and gratitude on that stage was unmistakable.
Her public voice may be retired but Eleanor’s personal and professional influence reverberates throughout the cultural life of Mississauga – Ontario – Canada – and the Philippines.
When she left her native land for Canada, Eleanor Calbes had $20 in her pocket and a dream in her heart. Through God-given talent, relentless determination and plain hard work, she’s fulfilled that dream and brought her voice, and her passion, to the music she loves.
She meets all of the criteria for induction into the Music Walk of Fame, for she has gained renown on the national and international stage and spent much of the last part of her life enriching the cultural life of Mississauga and passing her gifts on to its future stars.
Ronnie Hawkins has a way of landing in the middle of everything. From being born two days after Elvis Presley, to recording at the legendary Sun Records studio in Memphis in the 1950s, to anchoring the wave of rock and roll that swamped the Yonge St. strip in the 60s, to hosting John Lennon and Yoko Ono at his Mississauga Rd. farm as they launched their Peace Campaign in 1969, to playing Bob Dylan in Bob Dylan’s own movie, to acting in Heaven’s Gate — one of the biggest box office flops of all time — to dancing the Last Waltz with the boys in The Band — the Hawk has seen and done it all And quipped about it every step of the way.
He was born in Huntsville, Arkansas in 1935 — and reportedly did his first Camel Walk at the age of two.
He studied phys. ed at the University of Arkansas but really majored in rockabilly on the chitlin’ circuit. When his friend Gordon Jenkins, — stage name Conway Twitty — told him about how they loved southern-fried music in Canada, Ronnie was on his way north.
Turned out he was sentenced to be up here for 40 Years — and counting. He met and married Wanda and found a home on Yonge St. He mentored several generations of musicians in the best rock and roll finishing school of all time — Mr. Dynamo’s Nightly Bar-by-Bar World Tour.
Bob Dylan called Ronnie his “hero “ and said he was “the guru of rock and roll.”
He’s on Canada’s Walk of Fame and in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame and has won a Juno but his real claim to fame is that he’s never stopped believing in the hard core music he loves.
Through innumerable ups and downs, career breakthroughs and fallbacks, from disco to rap and back, Ronnie Hawkins has never wavered. He has remained true to the music he loves — old-school kickass rock ‘n roll.
So, Who Do You Love? How about the guy from down south who taught the Northland how to rock?
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.
If you can make your passion your profession, you will never have to do any real work again. It’s a philosophy that many men and women have dreamed of, but few have successfully executed.
Pre-eminent among musicians who have transformed their careers on the stage into a business that hasn’t just survived off the stage, but has earned its stripes on the forefront of the Canadian music industry, is Mississauga’s Gil Moore.
Everyone knows the story of Triumph, the Mississauga band who performed anthemic metal miracles in arenas around the world in the 1970s and 1980s, releasing more than a dozen albums, selling millions of records and eventually earning a place in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame.
In 1978 the band opened its own private studio on Mavis Rd. so it could tinker with its songs and not have to worry about booking studio time. When Triumph stopped performing a decade later, Moore dedicated himself full-time to the studio.
“Who doesn’t want to work at Disneyland each day?” he said when asked about his motivation in launching the studio. It is a decision that Canadian musicians — and musicians everywhere — look back on with deepest gratitude.
Metalworks has gone from a hole-in-the-wall industrial unit, with 20 students, to a musical mecca that is now more than 17,000 sq .ft. in size and features six studios, state-of-the-art lighting and sound, and audio facilities and innovative teaching techniques that reflect its owner’s unmistakable stamp of professionalism — a word that isn’t always top of mind in many aspects of the music business.
“Word of mouth from the artists is important,” Moore told The Mississauga News in an interview last year. “I think trust is number 1.” When the referrals are coming out of the mouths of artists with first-hand experience at Metalworks whose names are David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Katy Perry, The Cranberries, Rush, Prince, Tom Cochrane, Christina Aguilera, Guns ‘N Roses, Nelly Furtado, Anne Murray, Feist, and Metric, to name but a few — that’s a gold-plated endorsement.
Metalworks was named Recording Studio of the Year at the Canadian Music Industry Awards for a dozen consecutive years – so often that it might as well have been renamed the Gil Moore Recognition Award.
With all of the accolades that Triumph and Metalworks have received, you might think that a little some of that might go to a person’s head. But Gil Moore remains the same native son of Mississauga, the same unpretentious guy who founded Gil Moore Audio as a teenager and attended Streetsville and T.L. Kennedy Secondary Schools.
The same guy who always had a yen for construction – which may be why the never-ending expansion of Metalworks continues to this day. If you need a Mississauga Idol judge or sponsor, Gil is there. The prize may be studio time for just the winner, but somehow, he finds time for the top three finishers to record.
Metalworks sponsors the Q107 Homegrown contest , which is no accident. Moore has always had a deep and abiding respect for homegrown talent and he’s always respected his roots — which were planted deep in Mississauga, where he still lives.
He grew up in Erindale Woodlands and his parents, Martha and Herb, wrote columns for many years in The Mississauga News. One of those columns was called Suburban Style.
The Moores would be infinitely proud to know that their son has come to epitomize his own form of suburban style — one grounded in respecting and teaching the entire business of music, from conception to performance to recording to marketing and beyond, to succeeding generations of musicians.
Yes, Gil Moore is a wonderful musician, but we recognize him today for all the things he has done that make him so much more than that — those things that make him a true champion of his craft and a perpetual leader of his industry.
