Oliver Jones. Marthe Sansregret
when he came home from school, he wouldn’t talk much about his homework. He preferred to go to the piano, even if he disliked having to practise the same bars of his classical pieces over and over again. If he could only have played jazz, things would have been different. But his father still would not allow it.
On an afternoon when Oliver was playing with friends in front of a neighbour’s house on the corner of St. James and Fulford streets, he heard the young Oscar Peterson playing the piano. The music coming through an open window was so beautiful that he stood frozen to the spot. Because people were accustomed to talking to each other and helping each other in the community, Oliver simply decided to knock on the door of the apartment where the music was being played. As soon as Oscar’s sister Daisy opened the door, Oliver asked her: “Can you teach me how to play like that?”
In spite of his desire for a change, Oliver would always remain grateful to Jeanne Bonin for giving him a good grounding in classical music. He even managed to introduce her to the widowed grandfather of his good friend, Bruce Parent, when he and Bruce noticed that the old man had his eye on the lady. Not long after that, the classical piano teacher became step-grandmother to Bruce, a future jazz musician. It seemed that love made jazz sound sweet to her ears – as long as classical music stayed in first place. Yet she stopped teaching it after her marriage.
While the newlyweds were still basking in their unexpected bliss, Oliver, who wanted more than anything to play like Oscar Peterson, nine years older than he was, began studying piano with Oscar’s sister.
Daisy Peterson was born in Saint-Henri just after the end of the First World War. There were two girls in the family, May and herself, and three boys, Frederick, Charles (Chuck), and Oscar. Daisy had faced racial prejudice at public school. “At times I enjoyed school, but the prejudices were there. They had their favourites; they didn’t swear, but they ridiculed you. We were going to Protestant school, and Blacks were a minority.”
For the Petersons, like the Joneses, getting out of the city for the summer holidays was an impossibility. On hot summer nights, everyone sat outside on the steps, sometimes until two o’clock in the morning, chatting with neighbours and watching the world go by as the children played on the sidewalk.
The Petersons, who did not consider themselves poor as long as they could get along, found all sorts of ways to combat the effects of the Depression. They created their own luck through mutual assistance, bartering, and exchanging. As Daisy said, “It was a good community where, if something happened, we would be informed about it. Basically, we remained tied to the church and more or less, we knew from the church what was happening elsewhere because we did not have newspapers.”
Early in life, Daisy showed an obvious aptitude for the piano. Her father Daniel taught his talented daughter until the day he told her: “Now, you show the others.” With great humility, Daisy said of her illustrious pupils: “I did not make them what they were. I just passed on to them what my father had taught me. He gave us so much and we did the same thing later on. He was working on the trains. Some days, he was in, some days he was out, and he always checked on us. My father was a role model as far as music was concerned, a self-taught man.”
Later on, Daisy took private lessons with Paul de Marky, a pianist and composer originally from Hungary, who taught at the McGill Conservatory from 1929 to 1937 and gave concerts throughout Canada, the United States, and Europe. Daisy completed her music studies at McGill, where she became an associate professor.
At age eight, Oliver began his piano lessons at the Petersons’ house, with a beginner’s book. Daisy quickly noticed that he was different from her other students. Besides his exceptional talent, he was very obedient, well brought up, and had a natural politeness. At the same time, Oliver wasn’t overly serious – “just normal” – and he listened carefully. Daisy recalled that she never had any problems with him. And when the class was finished, she would take him by the hand to cross the street so he could not be hurt by a passing tram.
Oliver found her classes wonderful. They introduced him to a new world that brought structure and discipline to his music and to his life. Daisy said of Oliver: “I was hired by his parents and I immediately discovered his talent. Anything he would hear played, he would play it back. He used to copy what he heard from me, from Oscar, or from anybody.” Even though some students complained that Daisy was demanding, Oliver never found her too strict towards himself. He appreciated her as a teacher and as a person, even calling her by her first name. A mutual attachment began which would last for life.
Daisy also taught Oliver lessons of life that he never forgot. Of human behaviour, she said: “Since the beginning of humanity, there are people who want to be above others, no matter what the price, no matter what the consequences. Be wary of these men and women who, under any pretext, make sure other people will remain at the bottom.” She also had a definite view about life: “It’s about what you make of it. It’s not what you want, but what you make.”
Oliver inherited some of his teacher’s philosophy. Like Daisy, he knew that out of sorrow came joy, and that life was made up of the good and the bad. “You grow, you remember all the things that you have done or should have done, and you try to live with it and grow. If you look only at what you don’t have, you cloud what you have. So life is to be lived with the two sides of it, happy and unhappy.”
Going regularly to Daisy’s home, Oliver got to know her brother Chuck. The two boys, who both took piano lessons from Daisy, formed a strong friendship that would remain intact throughout their lives. This was just one of the several ways that the Peterson connection influenced Oliver’s life for the better.
Between these precious interludes, he endured school, never complaining. However, the minute the bell rang, he would run to meet his friends. Sometimes they would play on streets inhabited by families with higher incomes than those of Little Burgundy, but they rarely ventured into the wealthy area of Westmount, and then only when they were with Richard Lord, who lived on the street that bordered Westmount and Saint-Henri. But Oliver preferred to play close to the Lachine Canal, in a more typical Montreal neighbourhood.
Every spring, Oliver witnessed the feverish activity of families moving to a bigger apartment after the arrival of a new child. Since his own family had stopped growing – contraception was acceptable in the Jones’s religion – he watched other mothers “shopping” for apartments. Oliver remembered the mother of his friend Robert “Bud” Jones, a French-speaking girl from Gaspé who had married a Black man from the Caribbean, scouring Saint-Henri for an apartment with wooden shutters on each side of the windows. When she found one, she went straight into the kitchen and walked through to the back shed, oblivious of the other rooms in the dwelling. If there was a wooden coal bin in the shed, she would rent the apartment: when the family ran out of money for coal in the winter, she would use this wood for fuel. This was an example of what Oliver Wesley and Jestina Louise meant when they used to tell Oliver that everyone should live according to his means.
Those means, for most Black men, came from working on the railroad, often as porters. As for the White men in the neighbourhood, Oliver would see them walking early every morning to their jobs at Stelco, RCA Victor, General Steelware, or the tanneries. Some ran small businesses like grocery or hardware stores. Others worked in taverns which catered to an exclusively male clientele, and where food was served along with the beer. On Fridays, Oliver couldn’t help noticing the housewives who stood outside the tavern doors, waiting anxiously to find out if their husbands had drunk away their entire week’s pay. At this sorry sight, Oliver felt lucky that his own mother did not have to endure this situation.
There were also the nightclubs where Blacks and Whites worked together and where women were admitted. Oliver pricked up his ears whenever he heard live music as he passed on the sidewalk, especially the music coming from Rockhead Paradise, a club owned by Rufus Rockhead, originally from Jamaica, and of Maroon heritage. Oliver vibrated to the sounds and learned to differentiate between the blues, jazz, rhythm & blues, and bebop. Still very young, he promised himself: “Some day, I’ll be able to play in a band.”
Oliver had no opportunity to see inside the places from where these tantalizing rhythms were coming, but he heard that vaudeville shows, complete with chorus lines, were