new world we go

Fluid Grammars Of Jazz

Managing Editor

multimedia displays, and I felt the inkling that I’d follow my grandfather’s past in this city, a kinship that only the streams of jazz, of Davis’ quintets, of a Black expression mixing the visual, archival, written, material, and ephemeral could underwrite.

In this space between choosing classical over jazz and jazz always existing as spectre, opportunity, hope, and life-as-otherwise, there emerges a Black history of Montreal. In the early 20th century, as immigrants from Nova Scotia, the Caribbean, and the United States arrived in the city to work in the docks, industrial sector, and railroads, jazz clubs began popping up. This is a history and archive that DJ, activist, and educator Andy Williams, BEd ‘97, knows well and helps shape through his public writing and teaching. Working to fill the gaps in music’s social history, Williams has penned articles on Ajax Records, the first Black Canadian music label in Montreal, and Montreal as the “Harlem of the North.”

“[Jazz in Montreal] became really popular because of the prohibition. And, so in Montreal, we were able to drink until endless hours,” Williams told me. “A lot of the Black workers, whether they were porters or just musicians, were playing from 9 p.m. onward.”

In his more than 10 years of experience playing music across the world, Williams finds that listeners tend to be unaware of the full picture of jazz history in the city. For example, it’s one thing to know Oscar Peterson, but many people don’t know his mentor Lou Hooper or the greater influence beyond the “quiet legacies” of Daisy Peterson Sweeney, his sister.

“We realize a lot of the musicians were taught by the Black women in Burgundy because their husbands were at war,” Williams said. “And two of the women, Daisy Sweeney and Emily Clyke [Viola Desmond’s sister], in particular, were important to this. They ran this through the Union United Church in the 1940s […] what happens is it turns into a Christian-based self-empowerment group and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).”

Williams broke down the history for me. After World War II, community members who couldn’t afford music lessons could pay 25 cents for a course with Sweeney. Borrowing instruments and using donations given to the Negro Community Centre (NCC), she and Clyke in turn relied on the community to foster its next generation of musicians.

“Sweeney and Clyke would go to the thrift shop and get kids clothes,” Williams said. “It was kind of like finishing school, in a welcoming way.”

The work of Sweeney, the UNIA, and the NCC demonstrates to me that in the face of precarious living conditions for Black Montrealers, mutual aid worked as a practice of community formation. The global connections between Sweeney’s teaching and the panAfricanism espoused by the UNIA remind us that jazz is a global form. In recording their improvisations over time, artists incorporate African, Indigenous, and European music traditions. Just as Lewis pushes me to think about listening in collective improvisation, jazz as a form asks us to learn from one another, to consider and transcend difference, collectively.

As I thought through the global reach of jazz, I returned to a weekly presence in my life: Café Latino on JazzFM 91. My mom first introduced me to the show, and we would listen together in the car, on the radio at home, captivated and attuned by the music and the selections of host Laura Fernandez. Saturdays from 4 p.m. onward, we would feel transported to a place far from our suburb. When I asked Fernandez about the sense of community her show creates, she spoke to me about approaching the show with reciprocity. Often, she thinks of curation, circulation, and reception itself as a form of art and conversation.

“As a host, I have responsibility for sharing all the different permutations and giving light to new talent, but also to put the music in context of what came [...] before it,” Fernandez said. “It’s easy to look back and, and see how salsa and Boogaloo came to be for instance, in Latin music, but if I didn’t relate it to what came before salsa, which was Boogaloo, you [wouldn’t] understand how it kind of merged into salsa [...] and how salsa kind of started integrating political lyrics where it had never been done before.”

Fernandez, a producer and performer who has been immersed in the Latin jazz tradition for over 16 years, told me that the exploratory and improvisatory nature of jazz deeply affected her own bravery as a musician.

“I sometimes cover some of the songs that I hear and that I play,” she said. “I have tried to play Bebo Valdés’s little licks and his things that he does on the piano and integrate it into my own music [....]

Avila, Design Editor

I try to translate that kind of excitement to the audience because I get excited about it.”

But Latin jazz and music overall manifest towards different directions in each country and community— from Venezuela to Colombia to Argentina to Brazil and beyond.

“[A] lot of the Spanish music was influenced by North African and African roots as well,” Fernandez said. “So it just brings everybody together into one big world community [....] So I try to bring that out to the people.”

Having been introduced to various influences and styles by her parents, Fernandez thinks of jazz as a compass, a form that works in relation and in direction with multiple genres. When Fernandez started the show, she says it was more strictly bound by her own imposition of what Latin jazz meant. As she learned more about the genre’s varied historical influences, her broadcasts completely expanded to give audiences “a little bit of a map of how to discover the music.”

“[I] realize[d] that really, it’s a fusion of many elements, that you just can’t leave the other stuff out. It wouldn’t tell the whole story. So I like to broaden it,” Fernandez said. “You can’t exclude that, because that is the [...] progression of the genre [....] I feel that by putting it in context, with the whole trajectory of the form that, it just helps people engage better with it.

When I listened to Fitzgerald’s live recording a decade after visiting the Davis exhibition, I might have regretted the years of classical piano. The rules, the orders, the grammars of the line where I’m too committed. I have to graft the privileges and the progress that allowed me as a young Black pianist in an upscale, white music academy to choose what my icons such as Nina Simone could not––and against their genre too. I’m wondering if, as I mull over this decision in this city, I can curate a life that works to collaborate with my fellow citizens, past and present, who deserve redress in a global, free world. But I refuse to approach this alone. It’s in solidarity and community with those around me, with jazz artists and thinkers, that I hear a future––where we groove, too.