Eleanor Collins, Canada’s first lady of jazz, 104
Eleanor Collins, Canada’s first lady of jazz, who broke new ground for female and Black performers as the host of a 1955 variety series, “The Eleanor Show,” that brought her expressive voice and glamorous stage presence to audiences from Toronto to Yukon, died March 3 at a hospital in Surrey, B.C., a Vancouver suburb. She was 104.
Her family announced the death in a statement shared by Christine Hagemoen, a Vancouver writer, but did not give a cause. Ms. Collins had continued to live independently in Surrey, with some assistance from family and friends, until a week before her death.
A luminous singer who performed with jazz legends including Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Peterson, Ms. Collins spent her entire career in Canada, headlining radio and television shows for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and playing at jazz clubs and concert halls for decades.
She was appointed a member of the Order of Canada in 2014, praised as “a supremely talented vocalist who changed the face of race relations in mid-20th-century Vancouver,” and received additional latein-life recognition at 102, when her face was emblazoned on a postage stamp.
Unlike Peterson, a fellow Canadian who found fame in the United States, Ms. Collins had little interest in developing a career south of the border. She “never wanted a suitcase life,” she said, and preferred to stay close to home outside Vancouver, where she raised four children with her husband. Besides, she noted, her parents had made that trip in reverse years earlier — they migrated from Oklahoma to Alberta, joining hundreds of other Black homesteaders fleeing racial violence and prejudice in the South and the Midwest — and she saw no reason to retrace their steps.
As a result, Ms. Collins was scarcely known in the United States. She was also overlooked at times even in Canada, where jazz “occupied a decidedly marginal place” in popular culture for years, according to Canadian jazz scholar Marian Jago. Hardly any Canada-based jazz artists released commercial albums before the mid-1960s.
“Eleanor Collins, if she was American, would be mentioned in the same breath as Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald and Carmen McRae and Lena Horne,” Jago said in a phone interview, praising Ms. Collins’ phrasing and lyricism. “You hung on the words as she sang them, and you wondered what she was going to do next.”
Through her television appearances, Jago added, Ms. Collins became “an incredible driver for cultural progressiveness” in Canada.
She made her screen debut in 1954, appearing on a three-episode CBC Vancouver series, “Bamboula: A Day in the West Indies,” that featured Caribbean-tinged music and dancing performed by the first interracial cast on Canadian television. Ms. Collins, who sang a tender rendition of the Harold Arlen-Ted Koehler jazz standard “Ill Wind,” went on to get her own weekly variety show the next year, becoming the first Canadian woman and first Black Canadian entertainer to headline her own nationally broadcast series.
Airing on CBC Television from June to September 1955, “The Eleanor Show” vaulted Ms. Collins into a pantheon of pioneering Black entertainers that included Hazel Scott, who launched her short-lived U.S. television series on the DuMont network in 1950, and Nat King Cole, whose popular prime-time variety show began in 1956 on NBC. For the first episode, Ms. Collins donned a floral dress and pendant earrings, leaning against the piano while singing a lovelorn version of “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe.”
Although the series lasted only a few months, Ms. Collins remained a staple of the Canadian air waves, appearing on the popular CBC variety series “Juliette,” which premiered in 1956 and was hosted by a onetime guest on her own show, singer Juliette Cavazzi. She also hosted a 1964 variety series, this time called “Eleanor,” that reunited her with acclaimed pianist Chris Gage and featured many of the blues, folk, jazz and pop performances that had been a mainstay of “The Eleanor Show.”