Oliver Jones. Marthe Sansregret
the house. A call from home told the organizers that I was not going to play, but the tickets had been sold. Then a lady called to say that they were waiting for me down there at the church. I was upstairs trying to put on my pants, hoping my father was going to change his mind. The wonderful Mrs. Mitchell, who boarded at our house with her daughter Carmen, knew that I was dying to go to the concert. Somehow, she talked my father into letting me go, saying something that must have been important to get my father to agree. My mother came up and said 'Okay, you can go’ and I took off!”
Apart from this episode, Oliver considered his parents fair and generous. “Even though we were not very demonstrative at home – there was not a lot of hugging and kissing – we were still a very close family.” Oliver viewed his sisters as quiet and submissive, perhaps a little too shy, like he was. However, when he played with his friends on the street, he was caught up in their joie de vivre, and in that mood, he made all sorts of plans for the future.
That was how Oliver, Richard, and Bruce – whose father was French Canadian and whose mother was Mohawk – decided that they would play in Caughnawaga on weekends. Bruce’s older sister had married a chief of this First Nation reserve situated on the south shore of the St. Lawrence across from Lachine. The Mohawks of Caughnawaga (now called Kahnawake) were known throughout North America as “sky-walkers” for the uncanny skill and courage they showed erecting steel structures hundreds of metres above the ground. They were recruited for the construction of wide-span bridges crossing the St. Lawrence River, and skyscrapers like the Empire State Building. Unaffected by heights, the Mohawks loved walking on air as much as they loved dancing on the ground.
To reach the reserve, Oliver and his friends would take the express tramline to Lachine, then transfer to a bus to cross the Mercier Bridge. At the Joe Délisle Hall, they would play almost non-stop the whole evening, enjoying themselves tremendously. Then they would pass the hat to collect money to pay their fare back home.
Oliver continued to entertain people in the neighbourhood. When Richard’s parents held parties at home for family and friends, they always invited him to play, especially boogie-woogie. The Parrises owned a player piano, which could be switched from the automatic mode, with popular music rolls powered by foot, to manual. They also had an old pump organ; these pedals too had to be continually worked to produce the sound. Most of the time, it was Oliver who played that instrument. Richard Parris remembered his friend’s astonishing performances at their informal gatherings. “He had a talent, as natural as drinking a glass of milk! From what source did he gain this knowledge? It had to be from above.”
Richard, who, along with his brother Kenny, listened assiduously to the American radio stations, said: “I can see if Oliver had been in New York City, he would have been considered a child prodigy, because it was just impossible to see a boy so small sitting at the piano, for which we had to put something on a chair to make it high enough. A person has to practise and practise to get to that point. But not Oliver! Sometimes we would say 'Oh, he’ll make a mistake.’ But, no!”
Bruce’s parents and his sisters who lived nearby also loved to have Oliver come over. At one of their parties, Bruce boasted that Oliver could play the piano even if the keys were hidden. His parents took their son at his word and covered the keyboard with a towel. To their astonishment, Oliver executed “Bumble Boogie” perfectly.
Making music with his two best friends and the pleasure and fulfilment it gave him meant that Oliver had no reasons to get involved with gangs. Half a century later, after his children had grown up, Bruce Parent reflected: “If people today would do what we did, they wouldn’t be out there on these drugs, because we didn’t have that on our mind in those days, even if there were drugs around.”
Of course, Oliver wasn’t an angel. When he was twelve or thirteen, he got in trouble by throwing rocks or ringing people’s doorbells and running away, but not from committing petty crimes, stealing, or hurting someone on purpose. “That was never part of who I was. I never had any of those thoughts.” Nor did he have many quarrels with his friends. Richard Parris said of his lifelong relationship with Oliver: “We never had any serious conflicts aside from our baseball spats. Oliver is my treasured friend, the closest male to me.”
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Every time he could afford it, Oliver would go to hear famous American musicians like Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole play at the Forum. At the Seville Theatre, he had a revelation watching the famous Lionel Hampton playing the vibes and doing so with such tremendous energy. From that point onward, his motivation to play and even to practise sharply increased. Oliver, Richard, and Bruce now formed a strong musical group, which they didn’t yet dare call a band, that word being associated with making money. After a while, he and the others understood that the money would come in handy, especially since Richard and Bruce’s instruments needed upgrading.
Richard was now playing a clarinet his father had picked up in a pawnshop on Saint-Laurent Boulevard. The instrument in question was not even a regular B-flat clarinet; it was an E-flat alto clarinet in four pieces, and Richard had to carry part of it in a brown paper bag. He had a “hell of a hard time with it.” The pads stuck, and he’d replaced the broken springs for the keys by elastic bands. He finally got it to work properly even if he hadn’t really wanted to learn the clarinet. This was due to the condition that his father had imposed: “I’ll get you an instrument. Then, when you learn to play this instrument, I’ll buy you a saxophone.”
Bruce was luckier. His uncle, Frank Stacey, was a drummer who played in a twelve-piece band at the Old Dominion Club. Bruce, who admired his uncle and his drum set, took a chance and asked for one for Christmas. His mother replied that they couldn’t afford it, and Bruce was left wondering how he was going to keep playing a washtub and other household wares at the very time the group was starting to be in demand. But on the night of Christmas Eve, Bruce heard a noise downstairs and asked his mother: “Is that drums I hear?” “No, no,” his mother replied, “that’s only your uncle beating on a pot. You go to sleep!” The next morning, Bruce discovered that there was indeed a set of drums in the living room. He got dressed and ran to tell Oliver the news. The two boys rushed back to Bruce’s house. Even if the Parents’ piano was missing a few keys, Oliver was delighted to give Bruce some help breaking in his new drum set.
Oliver was happy for Bruce. He himself had to be content with the pianos that were available when he played outside his home, even when they were out of tune, had pieces of ivory missing from the keys, had broken strings or pedals, or were scratched and dusty. Yet this never diminished his passion for music. Any opportunity to hear it was welcome. Oliver used to go to the Sgrol Music Store, where the store owner and his son were friendly and easygoing. He was allowed to listen to many of the jazz records he heard on the American programs, which he liked to do at the home of one of Bruce’s sisters, who owned a new floor-model Fleetwood radio.
Oliver was so enthusiastic that listening and playing music with his friends became part of his daily life. People around them began to notice that he and his friends were not only good musicians but real showmen. During the summer, Bruce, who lived above the Lapostelle tavern on the corner of St. James and Fulford, would open the living room window to watch for the tram bringing people home from work. When the passengers disembarked, they would be treated to a free concert by the trio. Sometimes Bruce’s father, stopping at the tavern after his day at Windsor Station, would telephone upstairs and ask his wife: “Would you please tell Bruce to stop banging on those drums? The ceiling is falling in my beer!” Every time Oliver heard this, he would crack up.
If only the music could have gone on and on! But on Saturday mornings in the summer, Oliver was responsible for delivering his father’s garden produce to people in the neighbourhood. Although he would rather have been doing something else, he would rush to get the job done to have the afternoons and evenings free for meeting friends and having fun, sometimes until late at night.
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On December 9, 1947, Don Cameron, a CJAD radio host and a friend of Oscar Peterson’s, reported that a man by the name of Norman Granz had been sitting in a taxi on his way to Montreal’s Dorval Airport when he heard a live radio program broadcast from the Alberta Lounge, where Oscar was playing. After listening for a while, Mr. Granz abruptly