A CHRISTMAS ‘CARL’ Celebrating an amazing man
A year after his death, a city will remember renowned Hamilton pianist Carl Horton with a special reading of his favourite story
“If you ever saw me through a restaurant window, tears flowing down, from laughter, then Carl was at the other end of the table.” JIM WITTER His musical gift was prodigious but there was so very much more, and I say that having known him only a little. But to know him at all was to fall under a spell.
CARL HORTON,
neighbour, pianist extraordinaire, surprised me one day a few years ago, leaving a Keith Jarrett CD in my mailbox. No note, but I knew it was Carl. Who else puts Keith Jarrett (legendary avant-garde jazz musician) in your mailbox? Pretty sure it wasn’t the hydro meter guy.
Once Carl Horton surprised fellow musician Jim Witter at an Indian restaurant.
They’d just stood up from lunch when Carl reached in and gave Jim an enormous hug, saying, “I’ve been wanting to do that ever since your heart attack.” Jim had a heart attack about two years ago. “We were close, but it wasn’t really a hugging relationship,” Jim recalls. The hug melted him, as the Jarrett did me, and that was Carl.
Carl sometimes surprised singer Jude Johnson, whom he’d accompanied for decades, by not being surprised himself if she suddenly changed tempo in a song. Carl seemed always to be right there, all caught up, waiting for her on piano, as though anticipating, intuiting it.
Christmas Eve in Hamilton, strangers downtown would find their hands filled with money, maybe a pack of cigarettes or some other gift, and their ears filled with a kind word, their eyes with the sight of a man, Carl Horton, walking away, going to others in need to surprise them too with a generosity.
Carl loved Charles Dickens, he especially loved “A Christmas Carol” (he had an 1859 edition), and he adored Christmas, its real meaning. So he was out every Dec. 24 around the Salvation Army, other places where he knew he’d see people this time of year in need; maybe homeless, ill, desperate, lonely.
Carl, while rendering a kindness with one hand, snuck a song into our pockets with the other (always two things happening with a pianist’s hands — and he was a great one). We find it there still, a usually hollow space unexpectedly full — with his world of music and humanity. We have but to reach in and feel. Surprise. Music in a mailbox. A coin in a palm. A glowing charm in a stolen moment.
Not so long after he hugged Jim Witter, Carl too had a heart attack. Carl didn’t survive. He was 57. That was a year ago Sunday. It was a devastating loss.
On Wednesday, we will be reading “A Christmas Carol” in Carl’s memory. The “staves” of the story are being divided up among several readers: Tom Wilson, Matt Hayes, Connie Smith, Jim Witter, Rob McIsaac, Jude Johnson, Mandy Lagan, Annie Horton (Carl’s daughter), myself and others.
The event, called A Christmas Carl, will be free (goodwill donations), at the First Unitarian Church of Hamilton 170 Dundurn St. S., 7:30 p.m., all proceeds to Hamilton’s Out Of The Cold.
We’ll do it in Carl’s memory and in his love who was one of Hamilton’s greatest musicians and, well, a kind of Christmas tree of a human being. For years, Carl Horton was music director of the inimitable Geritol Follies. He was a composer, wrote numerous film scores, including “Home for Christmas,” starring Mickey Rooney, and scored many television shows for CITY-TV, LIFE, Bravo and CHCH.
Carl performed before Prince Charles, former prime minister Jean Chrétien and former president George H.W. Bush.
His musical gift was prodigious but there was so very much more, and I say that having known him only a little. But to know him at all was to fall under a spell. I’d hear him play the Sunday brunch at Chagall’s back when. I’d sit there with friends listening to him, shaking my head, jazzstruck, ruined for conversation.
At length I came, by chance, to be his neighbour. Sometimes I’d see him with wife Tina and his daughters Allie and Annie, his everythings.
I’d see him sometimes on my dog walks. We’d talk. Sometimes I’d notice him in the special breezeway of his home that he’d adapted as a kind of smoking hut. I’d join him. Again, we’d talk.
About? Jazz, Keith Jarrett, music, daughters, life, the city, about quitting smoking, anything. Whatever it was, when I left, it was like pulling away from something I’d become woven to.
I knew him, but a little. For those who knew him a lot, I can’t imagine. “I couldn’t perform for more than half a year after he died,” says Jude Johnson of her longtime musical partner and close friend.
The effect he had. Jim, fantastic singer/pianist in his own right, says: “If you ever saw me through a restaurant window, tears flowing down, from laughter, then Carl was at the other end of the table.”
In the story when Carl died, Tina was quoted saying, “He was a kind and tender person and loved by everyone. He would come through the door following a show, look at us and pronounce, ‘Here I am, you lucky people.’”
Were we ever. At his celebration of life a year ago, hundreds came. It was, as Auden once wrote, like the clocks had stopped.
Now, in memory, Carl seems almost impossible. Like some Dickens character, with a fanciful Dickens name — maybe Harmony Ivorytinkle.
But nothing was more real, more possible, I would say necessary, than Carl. We need a world of him now but we don’t even have the one, the unduplicable. Or maybe we do.
I see him still sitting at a piano, smiling over the music. We are the piano. Did he ever make us sound good.