Canadian jazz legend gets her own stamp

“Canada’s first lady of jazz,” Eleanor Collins, is getting her own commemorative stamp.

Canada Post says the 102-yearold music legend will be celebrated at a virtual event on Friday at 1 p.m. that will reveal the stamp and pay tribute to Collins’ life and career “as an artist, musician and mentor.”

Collins is to take part along with special guests who were influenced by and worked with her, including Nalda Callender

of the National Congress of Black Women Foundation, filmmaker Sylvia Hamilton,

musicians Sharman King, Marcus Mosely, Wendy Solloway and Alan Matheson, CBC music journalist Paolo Pietropaolo and former CBC Vancouver archivist Colin Preston.

The Edmonton-born Collins began performing in the 1930s on television and radio shows across the country, and has worked with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to Oscar Peter- son.

In 1954, she joined CBC’s “Bamboula: A Day in the West Indies” and became part of the first interracial cast on Canadi- an television. A year later, she starred in “The Eleanor Show,” which made her the first woman and first Black artist to head- line their own national TV se- ries. On her 95th birthday in 2014, Collins was invested in the Order of Canada for being “a civic leader and pioneer in the development of British Colum- bia’s music industry.” At the time, the governor-general’s of- fice noted that with her “beauti- ful voice and marvellous range (jazz, gospel, blues, pop),” she was often compared to Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald.

An in-person event had origi- nally been scheduled but was moved online due to recent COVID-19 restrictions.