Pitch-perfect politician
R.I.P. TOMMY BANKS: EXCEPTIONAL SENATOR, LEGENDARY MUSICIAN
SENATORS DO HAVE TIME FOR DEEP STUDY OF PROJECTS AND PROBLEMS. — COSH
When I heard that Sen. Tommy Banks had died of leukemia at age 81, I thought maybe the newspaper notices ought to be left to the people who knew him better — and in Edmonton that number comes to thousands upon thousands of people. I interviewed Banks a few times as a young political reporter. I think every such person has learned the procrastinator’s trade secret that if you’re doing an issues story, senators are easier to get hold of on a short deadline than elected MPs, and a lot easier than cabinet ministers, especially if you’re an unknown lightweight.
This, at least, used to be the case. I am not sure whether it applies to the Brave New Senate that now exists after the somewhat cynical appointments of Stephen Harper and the experimental renovations of Justin Trudeau. But if you have ever wondered why political beat writers and old codger columnists often have surprisingly positive sentiments about the Senate, which ninetenths of the people reading these words despise, this is probably one reason: a senator might call you back soon enough to be of some use.
And there’s another, related reason. In phoning a senator to chat about issues because you can’t get a “real” politician to return your inquiry, you would (or, anyway, I would) sometimes find surprisingly strong evidence that the Senate quietly lives up to its original constitutional promise. Spared the effort of endless electioneering and toilsome constituent service, senators do have time for deep study of projects and problems, and some freedom to develop independent opinions. I do not say that most of them use the time and the freedom, but it was, and I’m sure it still is, fairly easy to avoid the duds.
All of this is to say that Tommy Banks was just the kind of person the Senate was designed to contain. ( The more so because, as well- regarded as he was locally, he was still unelectable as a Liberal in Alberta.) He came from the world of jazz, and when they stick a professional performer in the Senate you cannot help suspecting that it is a matter of exploiting name recognition, or of currying favour with the arts crowd and the gala-goers.
This would ordinarily go double for a local- hero type like Sen. Banks. But he must have been one of the most impressive politicians I have ever spoken with: wellbriefed, thoughtful, a person of positively forceful intelligence.
I do not know much about Tommy Banks’s career in the arts: I am too young for that, and not enough of a jazz historian. He was obviously not an important person in the larger jazz world, or in any way a vanguard figure — but he seemed to know everyone. It must have been a side benefit of being a conductor and arranger of big- band music ( and being a talented accompanist couldn’t hurt). Eventually, if you last long enough, you get to know everybody who can play, and there might be literally hundreds of musicians to whom you had thrown a bone in their younger days.
Of course, if you are stingy or unpleasant, such a large entertainment-business network would be nothing but a hostile army arrayed against your reputation. For Banks it was obviously the opposite. Most Edmontonians my age will remember him as a TV figure — the host and bandleader for a long series of late- night music and variety shows, made for syndication or the CBC ( depending on what year it was).
These shows were made in frozen-over Edmonton, to which Banks felt an unheroic devotion, but he had guest-pulling power that still, in retrospect, borders on the uncanny. He was arguably a forerunner of SCTV, which later made brilliant U. S. network television using the Edmonton studios and technical facilities Banks sometimes did.
All of this is to say that I think of Tommy Banks not so much as a musician, but as a compère figure from an exotic lost world of independent TV stations, of true variety programming, of songs as opposed to musical brands, of a middlebrow culture that had not yet exploded into a billion fragments. In Edmonton he is one of the largest figures in the pantheon of reverence that all second- and third-rate cities build with the bricks of their cultural insecurity. He was a practitioner of a conservative form of an ever- struggling musical genre, but it takes a half- dozen people like Tommy Banks — whatever their chosen medium — to make the difference between a city and a mere cluster of buildings.