Indigenous social work

“Long an advocate of incorporating traditional Indigenous knowledge into social work, Jeannine Carriere (at left) has co-edited a book of essays about addressing this urgent need.FULL STORY

 

All that “jazz-a-ma-tazz”

Two books show why Vancouver’s jazz scene remains vital.

January 16th, 2025

The great Vancouver saxophonist, Fraser MacPherson led the life of a working musician.

“Local musicians—even those who, like Fraser MacPherson, won a degree of international acclaim—have generally operated from a sense of responsibility to the music and its listeners, rather than chasing an illusion of wealth or fame.”—Reviewer Alexander Varty.


Review by Alexander Varty

A biography and an overview. A memoir, and a patiently assembled collection of oral histories. One focused on a suave downtown bandleader with a larger following abroad than at home; the other mostly memorializing the beboppers and beatniks who assembled in East Vancouver and, for the most part, never left.

Chris Wong’s Journeys to the Bandstand: Thirty Jazz Lives in Vancouver and the late Guy MacPherson’s Fraser MacPherson: I Don’t Have to Go Anywhere—I’m Already Here could not be more different. And yet, taken in concert with Marian Jago’s 2018 study Live at The Cellar: Vancouver’s Iconic Jazz Club and the Canadian Co-operative Jazz Scene in the 1950s and ‘60s (UBC Press) they create a symbiotic history of improvised music at the ends of the earth, as Vancouver must have seemed following the end of the Second World War.

How did a rough-and-tumble resource port develop such a vital jazz community in just a few short years? How and why did the innovators of the 1950s set the scene for the resurgence of jazz in Vancouver, mostly taking place under the radar of an increasingly moribund music industry, that we’re seeing now? And who, anyway, was Fraser MacPherson?

These questions are not entirely answered by any one of these books, or even by all three taken together. But as a loose (and apparently unplanned) trilogy, they lay the groundwork for further histories to come, and they’re essential reading for anyone interested in Vancouver’s once and future cultural life.

Writer and comedy critic Guy MacPherson, one would think, would be the perfect person to write Fraser MacPherson’s biography: he was the great saxophonist’s son. As such, he had complete access to his dad’s archives, as well as the generous support of Fraser’s surviving friends and colleagues. It shows: at times, I Don’t Have to Go Anywhere—I’m Already Here approaches a day-to-day chronicle of the life of a working musician, an approach that is not without its merits. We’re taken into grimy and quite possibly wired Russian hotel rooms, as MacPherson senior becomes the first Western musician to enjoy multiple tours of the Soviet Union, slipping in through the Iron Curtain just as it is beginning to fray and rust. We get a look at life before streaming—and before quartets with amplifiers replaced big bands with horns—as we follow Fraser through a day of recording sessions, night-club engagements, and after-hours jam sessions. We also get a detailed sociological explanation of the somewhat porous borders between downtown Vancouver’s super-skilled session musicians in their Mad Men suits—MacPherson being one—and the looser, reefer-puffing free spirits who haunted the original Cellar, and before that Richmond’s even less-formal Wailhouse.

Richmond, hotbed of the avant-garde. Who knew?

Having only one story to tell rather than 30, Guy MacPherson gets to go into more detail about these scenarios, and so I’d recommend reading I Don’t Have to Go Anywhere—I’m Already Here first. It will certainly set you up well for the faster pace of Wong’s book, which begins during the same era but skews more towards the bohemians, although some of the same characters recur.

What we don’t fully get from Guy’s writing, however, is a deep sense of who Fraser was behind his saxophone and aviator shades. Perhaps that’s not surprising. There are few musical settings more intimate than a trio, but even MacPherson’s long time bandmate Oliver Gannon, who played hundreds of shows with the saxophonist, found it difficult to dig beneath the older musician’s calculated reserve. “Being on the road with him, even as far from home as Russia, it’s like pulling teeth, trying to get to know him,” the guitarist reports. “He’d be very sparse with the words. Me, because I’m an Irishman, I’d tell you the whole story. But he was very, very guarded.”

Even with his own son, that circumspection was rarely breached. Obviously constrained by marriage, Fraser left his wife and their young children within months of Guy’s birth, maintaining an apartment in Vancouver’s West End while the rest of the family decamped to Victoria. Guy relays some fond memories of vacationing with his father, but it’s telling that he was never told that he was loved until close to the end of Fraser’s life. (This, admittedly, is not uncommon in families of Scottish or English descent.)

Painful though this might be, it also humanizes I Don’t Have to Go Anywhere—I’m Already Here. MacPherson’s search for his father’s soul reads as a mystery as well as a biography. Undoubtedly driven by his own sense of mortality—he died of pancreatic cancer before his book was published—Guy MacPherson is open about his struggle to make sense of an absence in his life, and this leads emotional heft to what could have been a straightforward, fans-only chronicle. It’s not always comfortable reading, but it’s honest and heartfelt.

A sense of loss is also palpable in Journeys to the Bandstand, despite its apparently celebratory intent. As narrator, Wong doesn’t play as large a role here, but it’s disquieting to reach the book’s last full chapter and discover a very personal encomium to the singer Natasha D’Agostino, who died in an automobile accident just prior to the release of her sole album as a bandleader, Endings Rarely Are. She was only 26. Ending on such a downbeat—although, again, heartfelt—note gives Wong’s book the air of a eulogy, especially given its focus on a generation of musicians who are rapidly fading from memory. A number of other sad stories are told here, too, including the late and much-missed Ross Taggart’s little-publicized struggle with depression, physical pain and substance abuse, and the effervescent singer Kate Hammett-Vaughan’s recent slide into early-onset Alzheimer’s.

I kept waiting for Wong to perk up and report that today, despite a spate of club closings and the economically unfulfilling life of the working musician, jazz and improvised music in Vancouver appear to be healthier than they have been for decades. But perhaps that’s a different book.

What we’re given here, however, is invaluable. Working primarily from in-person interviews, with occasional forays into the archives, Wong adds Vancouver-centric chapters to the lives of such notable visitors as the radical saxophonist-composer Ornette Coleman and the flamboyant organist Dr. Lonnie Smith, but centres his narrative on the local sparkplugs who kept the music going, even during the doldrums of the rock ’n’ roll ‘60s. Especially valuable are two well-deserved chapters on jazz impresario and saxophonist Cory Weeds, whose Cellar Live imprint has singlehandedly established Vancouver as one of the global centres of jazz recording. (Weeds is also responsible for ushering I Don’t Have to Go Anywhere—I’m Already Here into print, following Guy MacPherson’s death.)

Along with Coastal Jazz and Blues Society founders Ken Pickering and John Orysik (and, more recently, avant-garde champion Tim Reinert), Weeds is an outstanding example of cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead’s famous adage, “Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world.” Without them, Vancouver’s cultural landscape would be far less vital than it is today.

The same could be said for a number of Wong’s other subjects, most notably the Wailhouse graduates who founded the original Cellar club, established a West Coast jazz connection that still resonates here (from Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle to Vancouver), and whose impact extends beyond jazz into several other media, including painting and performance art. Particularly engaging is the story of saxophonist Dave Quarin, an exceptional musician and one of a handful of Cellar stalwarts to fully integrate themselves into the postmodern approach of a younger generation, in the demanding company of John Korsrud’s Hard Rubber Ensemble. Quarin ended his long life in self-imposed obscurity, having chosen Campbell River and the pursuit of Tyee salmon over diminished scales and the city, but it’s fascinating to see his contributions given proper credit. I doubt I’ll be alone in wishing I’d paid him more attention when he was still working—although, self-effacing as he was, I’m not sure he would have appreciated a larger spotlight.

And that’s crucial to jazz in Vancouver, anyway. Local musicians—even those who, like Fraser MacPherson, won a degree of international acclaim—have generally operated from a sense of responsibility to the music and its listeners, rather than chasing an illusion of wealth or fame. “You’ve got to make your own scene,” trombonist and educator Dave Robbins wisely told the young multi-instrumentalist Hugh Fraser, and by bringing the Vancouver scene into sharper focus, Wong and MacPherson have both done their part.

9781738248704 I Don’t Have Anywhere to Go

9781039161603 Journeys to the Bandstand

*

Senior West Coast arts journalist Alexander Varty lives on unceded Snuneymuxw territory.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  • About Us

    BC BookLook is an independent website dedicated to continuously promoting the literary culture of British Columbia.