‘HE TRULY WAS WORLD-CLASS’
Remembering Tommy Banks
As a red-hot jazz pianist and internationally acclaimed conductor, Tommy Banks could have lived anywhere. But he loved Edmonton, and here he stayed.
That loyalty was returned by Edmontonians, and a packed house is expected on Wednesday, when a celebration of Banks’s life is being held at 7 p.m. at the Winspear Centre.
Banks’s colleagues and fellow musicians are flying in from around the globe, including trumpet player Jens Lindemann. There will be a big-band performance, lead by Ray Baril, and the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra also is playing, with saxophonist P.J. Perry in attendance, too.
Doors open at 5:30 p.m. Musicians are invited to bring their instruments for a jam session after the celebration. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Tommy Banks Centre for Musical Creativity or the Wellspring Foundation.
A member of Canada’s Senate for 11 years, Banks, 81, died Jan. 25 in the palliative unit of the Grey Nuns Hospital, just a few months after being diagnosed with leukemia.
Banks is survived by his wife, Ida, described by son-in-law Kevin Chipman as “the light of his life.” The Banks had three children, Jill (who is married to Chipman), Tom Junior and Toby, who died in 2001, and four grandchildren, Mallory, Matthew, Thomas and Jenna.
Since his death, tributes to his life have been coursing through social media and along traditional channels.
World-famous Los Angeles musician and producer David Foster tweeted, “The world has lost one of the true musical greats, my mentor and dear friend, Senator Tommy Banks. A gentleman and a gentle man.”
Foster, the renowned Hollywood producer born in Victoria, B.C., and a 16-time Grammy award winner, met Banks when he played in the musician’s band at the age of 19.
He calls Banks his greatest mentor and credits him with imparting the basics of the business to Foster as a young man, from writing jingles, to how to record in the studio.
“The world has lost a great musician,” Foster said in a phone interview from Los Angeles.
“I know he was Edmonton’s favourite son, but I hope people realize he truly was world-class. In my mind, you can say Oscar Peterson and Tommy Banks in the same sentence.”
Edmonton Singing Christmas Tree producer, band leader and musician David Cameron echoed the sentiment, noting that Banks was “one of the most amazing piano players and musicians that I ever met.”
“He had impeccable ears,” said musician Kent Sangster, the executive and artistic director of the TD Edmonton International Jazz Festival.
“He could mimic and play styles extremely well because of that. In my capacity as an instructor at MacEwan (University), I brought him in to do a clinic, a composing class, and he said, ‘I’m not really a composer.’
He brilliantly arranged the music of others and was an idiomatic writer. He could write in the style and was able to provide the proper music at the proper time, whatever the function may be.”
BANKS THE BUILDER
The ability to know exactly what was required musically, and to make it happen, was part of Banks’ success as a musician, and as a business person, say colleagues. He created a successful television series out of Edmonton featuring performances by the ultra-famous, including Tom Jones and Tina Turner, decades before Edmonton was known as a cultural hub. In fact, numerous local folks interviewed for this story credit Banks for being a founder of the city ’s arts scene. Period.
“One of the things that Tommy is so admired for is his ability to create something where there was nothing before,” said University of Saskatchewan music professor and trumpet player Dean McNeill, who was a student at Grant MacE wan Community College when Banks was head of the music program there. “He put the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra on the map as one of the country ’s premier pop orchestras of the 1970s. It helped people to know about Alberta in a way they would not otherwise have known.”
McNeill and others spoke of Banks’s contributions to making Edmonton and Alberta a magnet for investment, and for business growth. Banks and his wife, Ida, also invested their own money in the community, owning a booking agency, plus a white-tablecloth restaurant and night club, The Embers, as well as a bookstore for a time. Banks believed that wonderful things could happen in Edmonton, and he made it so.
Trumpet player Harry Pinchin, for 60 years one of Banks’s closest friends, bandmates and musical collaborators, said Banks was often given opportunities to move elsewhere, and to do something amazing there. Here’s what Banks said to those offers: “We’re going to do that, but we’re going to do it here.”
“We were the first people to perform on the air at ITV and launched the concert series that ran in over 100 countries of the world, and that was all Tommy. He was the guy,” said Pinchin. “And I think of that when I think of the early development of the Winspear Centre. He was the guy. Like Gretzky, someday, someone will break those records but at the moment I don’t see another Tommy Banks in this country.”
BANKS THE CRAFTSMAN AND ARTIST
A precocious musician as a child, Banks began his professional career at 14 in the band of jazz saxophonist Don Thompson. By the age of 18, he was music director of the Orion Musical Theatre in Edmonton, and co-ordinator of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. At age 32, Banks was host, pianist, conductor and arranger for the Gemini Award-winning Tommy Banks Show, which ran until 1974, and again from 1980 to 1983.
In a 2016 interview with Postmedia, Banks credited his parents (his mother was Edmonton television personality Laura Lindsay) with trusting him enough to let him begin his touring career at a tender age. He remained grateful for the opportunity to entertain audiences locally and around the world for more than 65 years.
“Entertain may be the wrong word, but you always have to somehow attract and maintain the attention of the audience, whether you’re playing background music at a cocktail party or a concert at the Winspear,” he said. “Early on, I had to make the choice of whether to be an artist or a craftsman. I wanted to play music for a living. And every once in a while, craftspeople get to practise … art.”
He passed his craft, his art, on to his family, too. His granddaughter, Mallory Chipman, 23, is a jazz singer and instructor at MacEwan University. She said that while her grandfather was a huge supporter, he never pushed her until she had made up her own mind to pursue a career in music.
“It was special, because we had this family relationship, but also a professional and musical relationship,” said Chipman. “And as somebody who was obviously a very busy person and travelled the world doing what he loved so passionately, he also made so much time for family, always coming to my brother’s hockey games, to dinners at our go-to restaurants, the Bistro Praha and the Lingnan.”
Chipman sat beside her grandfather on the piano bench for the family ’s yearly carolling tradition. He was her accompanist when she sang at the Kiwanis Festival as a little girl.
“People in the audience would be saying, ‘Is that Tommy Banks?’ But I never even thought about that. He was my grandpa.”
Born in Calgary, Banks was a passionate Edmontonian, volunteering large amounts of time to local musical projects, such as the Edmonton Concert Hall Foundation, which raised funds for the Winspear Centre, acting as its chair from 1989 to 1991.
In gratitude, the city named a street after him, Tommy Banks Way, located near the Yardbird Suite jazz club, which he founded in 1957, and where he performed countless times.
As a founding member of the Alberta Foundation for the Performing Arts, Banks toiled to ensure promising local musicians received exposure across the country. He is remembered as a band leader who paid his people well, and on time, and made sure they had comfortable accommodations on the road.
BANKS THE MENTOR
People spoke of the way Banks “held himself.” In this, they meant he had a presence, and integrity.
“He would walk in a room and take it over in a good way,” recalled McNeill. “He’d say, ‘This is the way we are going to do things,’ but the way in which it would be done would be of benefit to everyone.”
McNeill recalls being a young musician who began adjudicating music festivals alongside Banks, and this made him very nervous. He recalls being given a small per diem for meals, and finding himself at breakfast one morning with Banks and other musical leaders.
“Tommy said, ‘Dean, you pick up the bill for breakfast.’ But then when supper came around, he’d say ‘I’ll get the bill.’ So I’d pick up the $30 breakfast, and he’d get the $300 dinner. It was emblematic of the way he would do things.”
One of Banks’s fans was Humberto Capriz, 55, an Italian immigrant who heard Banks play about 10 years ago at the Sutton Place Hotel. Not knowing he was famous, Capriz approached Banks afterward to express his gratitude for the music, and then saw him regularly in clubs thereafter. He said Banks (who later was honorary judge at Capriz’s citizenship ceremony) never talked about his accomplishments, but rather went out of his way to make Capriz feel that he had a place in Canada, and would do wonderful things here.
“I have lived in many cities but this is a great city with great people, and Tommy Banks always made me feel welcome and like there was opportunity for you here.”
A member of the Edmonton Hall of Fame, Banks won numerous, major musical and cultural awards in Canada, including a Juno and a Gemini, and worked with international celebrities from Aretha Franklin to Tony Bennett.
Banks was involved in many aspects of the cultural sector. He provided musical direction for the 1978 Commonwealth Games, Expo 86, the World University Games and the 1988 Olympic Winter Games. He produced and conducted command performances for numerous prestigious guests, including U.S. president Ronald Reagan and Queen Elizabeth II. A member of the Canada Council from 1989 to 1995, Banks was an officer of the Order of Canada.
BANKS THE STATESMAN
When appointed to the Senate in 2000, Banks approached the job with an old-school ethic of public service, and a deep respect for Parliament. In 2001, he was vicechairman of the Liberal committee devising a new deal for Canada’s cities. Later, he worked on the Senate’s controversial report on illegal drugs and marijuana. He took the new Species at Risk Act through the Senate, and worked on public safety and emergency preparedness after the 9/11 terrorists attacks in the U.S.
For several years, Banks was chair of the energy, environment and natural resources standing committee. He also scored a rare victory on Parliament Hill as one of the few senators to get a private member’s bill passed, and turned into law (although it took nine years to get the Statutes Repeal Act enacted into law). The law is designed to prevent governments from passing laws, then not putting them into force.
At 75, Banks retired from the Senate, but growing older did little to slow his pace. He continued to play a busy range of dates nationwide, right up to a few months before he died. His longtime bandmate, friend, and saxophonist P.J. Perry calls Banks the “most gifted and natural musician I’ve ever met, and I’ve heard all the best in the business.”
“When it came to accompanying someone, he was the best I ever heard,” said Perry. “Tommy could play a song in any key without even having to think about it. And he knew exactly how to bring out the best in a soloist, knew when to play and when not to play and he knew every song ever written.”
Perry met Banks in Sylvan Lake when he was 14 and Banks was an up-and-comer of 19 who had come to the town’s Varsity Hall to jam with Perry’s dad’s band. Perry’s respect for Banks’s musical talent from that day forward only grew.
“One day, in front of me, he wanted to write down the melody and chord changes for a song,” said Perry. “He put a record on the turntable and he grabbed a ballpoint pen and a piece of manuscript paper. He put the needle on the record and wrote out the song, as the record was playing. I saw this with my own eyes. Tommy could play any style of music and he is as close to a prodigy as anyone I ever met, and he could have commanded any position anywhere in the world.”
Perry remembers Banks as an inspiring leader, because he made you believe in yourself. Perry, who played a number of instruments but not the flute, recalls deciding to learn that instrument because it was showing up in musical scores. He bought one and told Banks he would bring it to practise when he had learned to play.
“He said ‘don’t wait, bring it tonight and learn it on the job.’ And I think that’s a perfect Tommy Banks story. That’s the kind of leader he was. He made his mark everywhere he went.”