GOLDEN AGE OF CITY’S JAZZ
Veteran drummer Norman Marshall Villeneuve has unearthed rare sessions from the golden age of Montreal jazz, including what may be the only existing recordings from the fabled Rockhead’s Paradise club,
Veteran drummer Villeneuve unearths rare sessions
Decades after it closed in 1980, Rockhead’s Paradise lives on in memory.
Founded in 1928 by Rufus Rockhead, a former railway porter, the three-storey cabaret at de la Montagne and St-Antoine streets was famous for hot dancers and cool jazz.
Stars like Louis Armstrong would drop in when in town, after performing at the Forum or uptown clubs, and sometimes sit in for a set. Ella Fitzgerald made her first Montreal appearance there in 1943, the year she launched her solo career.
Walking tours, documentaries and reunion concerts have paid tribute to the mythic club, where jazz icon Oscar Peterson snuck in as a teenager and pianist Oliver Jones cut his teeth.
But what did the music there actually sound like?
A newly released recording by legendary Canadian drummer Norman Marshall Villeneuve opens a window to the smoky world of Rockhead’s and the Black Bottom, an after-hours jazz club on St-Antoine in the 1960s and ’70s.
Villeneuve, 79, who grew up in St-Henri and performed locally for 20 years before moving to Toronto in 1974, often recorded sessions on reel-to-reel tape.
“I wanted to tape the band and have it as a memory,” he said in an interview in his modest Notre-Dame-de-Grâce apartment, lined with photographs and artworks chronicling a life in jazz and a career that has spanned more than 60 years.
For decades, the tapes sat forgotten. Then in 2013, when Villeneuve remarried and moved back to Montreal, his wife, Louise, got curious about what was on the tapes he’d been lugging around all those years.
“I said, ‘Norman, what’s on here?’ ” she said.
The result is Montreal Sessions, seven tracks recorded by Villeneuve with other stalwarts of the local jazz scene between 1963 and 1974.
The Villeneuves raised $5,000 in a crowdfunding campaign to produce the album, along with a second one, King Dog, from a 1985 recording session at Toronto’s Kensington Sound Studios.
McGill music professor, jazz pianist and sound engineer André White remastered the tapes, which were remixed by engineer Jesse Jaeo Tolbert.
Villeneuve and White believe the sessions might be the only existing recordings from Rockhead’s, which was demolished in 1991.
There’s also a track recorded in 1965 at the Black Bottom.
The album transports listeners back to a time when the jazz scene that produced Oscar Peterson and Oliver Jones was still going on, and local performers like Nelson Symonds (1933-2008), considered an unrecognized genius in his lifetime, were in their prime. It also features his cousin, guitarist Ivan Symonds (1933-1991), who ran a jazz café on Ontario St. E. in the late 1970s and early ’80s.
Three tracks are from a 1969 recording session with Nelson Symonds and bassist Charlie Biddle at Stereo Sound Studio in Montreal. Showcasing Symonds at his best, they leave you wanting more.
“The trio session with Nelson is really significant because he’s playing really well on it and he was not recorded a lot,” White said.
“There wasn’t much attention paid to Nelson as an innovator of the guitar, which was what he was,” he added.
Two of the tracks, by the Rockhead’s show band in 1963, feature players from the city’s 1920s-1950s golden age of jazz: trumpeter and bandleader Allan Wellman; pianist Linton Garner, brother of Erroll Garner, who composed the jazz standard Misty; electric bass player Nick Aldrich, a veteran of New York’s Cotton Club in the 1930s; and Ink Spots guitarist Bernie Mackey.
Villeneuve was born on May 29, 1938, to a white mother whose husband threw her out when she gave birth to the mixed-race child of another man.
Placed in a boys’ home at the age of seven, he was raised by a loving foster family in a community held together by church and music.
A cousin of Oliver Jones, Villeneuve attended Union United Church on Atwater Ave. and took piano lessons from Oscar Peterson’s sister, Daisy Peterson Sweeney.
His adoptive brother, Charles Griffith, who went on to dance professionally and found a dance school, taught him tap dancing and the boys performed together for several years.
But there was never any doubt about his true passion.
“Right from the beginning, I had sticks or branches in my hands,” Villeneuve recalled.
“I drove the teacher crazy with my pencils: ‘Norman, stop tapping the pencil!’ ”
For Norman’s 14th birthday, Charles brought home a drum set.
From then on, “it was just always music, music, music,” said Villeneuve, who spent hours listening to albums by his idol, bebop drummer Art Blakey, along with Max Roach, Philly Joe Jones and Art Taylor.
Villeneuve came of age in a city with a rich jazz tradition.
“For almost half a century, more jazz was made in Montreal than anywhere else in Canada,” writes John Gilmore in Swinging in Paradise: The Story of Jazz in Montreal (Véhicule Press, 1988).
Montreal had about 3,000 black residents by the late 1920s, according to Gilmore. Many worked as porters on the railways that crossed the Little Burgundy neighbourhood, known as the Harlem of the North.
When Prohibition shut down bars across the United States from 1920 to 1933 — a few years after most of English Canada went dry — Quebec was one of the few jurisdictions where liquor still flowed freely.
That made Montreal the nightclub capital of Canada and a magnet for the jazz craze, not to mention organized crime.
American jazz musicians poured into the city to perform and some stayed on. By the 1940s and ’50s, hundreds of local nightclubs and restaurants offered live entertainment, from crooners to novelty acts.
Montreal’s jazz legends included violinist Willy Girard, who was steeped in traditional Quebec fiddle music and innovated his own brand of jazz years before French violinist Stéphane Grappelli popularized the genre. Peterson, trumpeter Maynard Ferguson and pianist Paul Bley were among the city’s bestknown jazz exports.
But mayor Jean Drapeau’s crackdown on vice in the early 1950s took a toll on the music scene. Rockhead’s was shut down from 1953 to 1961; Rockhead claimed it was over a demand for protection money from someone in a position of power in Quebec City.
Villeneuve got his first full-time gig at 17, playing six nights a week in a restaurant across from Windsor Station, and honed his craft touring small Quebec towns. At 25, he joined the Rockhead’s show band, playing with seasoned musicians like Wellman, Aldrich and Garner. “That was a big thrill for me,” he recalled. For a few years, he travelled with Jones, backing up calypso singer Kenny Hamilton in Miami and Puerto Rico.
At various times, Villeneuve was forced to supplement his earnings by delivering chicken, working as a janitor and even playing rock ’n’ roll. “It didn’t appeal to me,” he said of the last. “But I tell you one thing: If I had known at that time that in the future that’s all you would be hearing on the radio and television, and those big groups are making money, I wouldn’t be as poor like I am today! Ha ha. But it wasn’t my thing.”
By the 1960s, many live venues like Chez Parée on Stanley St. had converted to strip clubs.
Villeneuve was playing there in 1967 when opportunity knocked, in the form of an offer to join Duke Ellington’s big band. Ellington, in town to play at Expo 67, invited him to try out in Boston.
“I said, ‘Wowee, I would love to,’ ” recalled Villeneuve, who joined the big band at a birthday bash for the Duke.
“It felt good. I wasn’t scared or nervous. I just played the way I felt the music.”
A job offer arrived in the mail, now proudly displayed on his wall.
But his U.S. work permit never came through, and Ellington hired another drummer.
Villeneuve took the disappointment with his usual glass-half-full attitude.
“It was an experience and I experienced part of it, and I was very happy and pleased,” he said.
His fondest memories include a 37-month stint with Nelson Symonds and Biddle at Café La Bohème on Guy St. in the late 1960s, playing six nights a week from 9:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m.
Montreal jazz pioneer Biddle, who died in 2003, is still remembered for the club that was named after him on Aylmer St.
Word of Symonds’s musical prowess spread far beyond Montreal, Villeneuve said.
“While we were there, working for 37 months, all the big names would come by and see us,” Villeneuve said.
“I was here, and guess who was sitting there?” he said, pointing to a stool a few feet away. “Stevie Wonder. Apparently he heard about this fabulous guitar player.
“The world talked about Nelson. Fabulous, fantastic.”
But when opportunities arose, the shy guitarist, who lived in a single room on Fort St., would respond: “No, man, I’m not ready.”
“I miss a lot of my musician friends, very, very much,” Villeneuve said. “And Nelson touched me the most out of all the people.”
Symonds and Villeneuve recorded King Dog in one take, with Kingsley Ettienne on Hammond organ and Doug Richardson on sax and flute.
“That’s great that those guys recorded that stuff on their own, because the people that were making records didn’t seem to be much interested in those musicians, which was a tragedy,” White said.
Villeneuve’s playing is noteworthy for the “energy and power and commitment he brought to the drum set,” he said.
Villeneuve has performed with Jones at concerts honouring Bill Clinton, Jean Chrétien and Nelson Mandela.
Known for encouraging young musicians, he presents the Norman Marshall Villeneuve Percussion Award each year to a promising percussion student.
His greatest disappointment is the lack of opportunities for jazz musicians.
“Over the past 30 years, things are just dying, dying, dying,” said Villeneuve, who contends the Montreal International Jazz Festival does little to foster local jazz musicians.
“What jazz fest? I don’t even like to discuss it. A jazz festival should be a jazz festival.”
Despite health problems including Paget’s disease, a bone disorder, he still performs, working out on the drums twice a week.
“When Norman steps behind his drums, 20 years disappear,” Louise said.
“It’s my life,” he said. “I do it because I love it, I enjoy it, and I’m not going to stop. I’m going to play to the end of time.”