MILLER, Mark 1951-

PERSONAL:

Born November 6, 1951, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Education: York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, B.A., 1973.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Globe and Mail, 444 Front St. W., Toronto, Ontario M5V 2S9, Canada. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Mercury Press, P.O. Box 672, Station P, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2Y4, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Freelance writer and photographer. Globe and Mail, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, jazz critic, 1978—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) Award for best research in the field of recorded jazz or blues, 2002, for The Miller Companion to Jazz in Canada and Canadians in Jazz.

WRITINGS:

Jazz in Canada: Fourteen Lives, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1982.

Boogie Pete and the Senator: Canadian Musicians in Jazz: The Eighties, Nightwood Editions (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1987.

Cool Blues: Charlie Parker in Canada, 1953, Nightwood Editions (London, Ontario, Canada), 1989.

(Associate editor) Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, second edition, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1992.

Such Melodious Racket: The Lost History of Jazz in Canada, 1914-1949, Mercury Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1997.

The Miller Companion to Jazz in Canada and Canadians in Jazz, Mercury Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2001.

Contributor to periodicals, including Coda, Down Beat, Jazz Forum, and Saturday Night.

SIDELIGHTS:

In Canadian jazz critic Mark Miller's first book, Jazz in Canada: Fourteen Lives, the author focuses not on jazz greats who came from Canada, like Maynard Ferguson and Oscar Peterson, but rather on jazz musicians who play in Canada, where the opportunities have traditionally been more limited than in the United States.

Maclean's writer Ian Pearson noted that "jazz is the most American of music. It was never a Canadian tradition to come home after an arduous day of clearing woods and blow a hot version of 'Potato Head Blues' on the family cornet." In addition, radio stations were lax in providing live American performances, and American bands played primarily for audiences in the States. Consequently, Canadian jazz masters were playing music that was decades behind the curve.

Some of the men Miller profiles have made no professional recordings, some abused alcohol and drugs, and five of his subjects had died, one of suicide. A Choice reviewer commented that "there is a melancholy feeling throughout this book, a feeling born out of the frustrations of men searching for something they could not quite grasp." A tragic example is pianist Chris Gage, who was favorably compared to Peterson, but who stayed in Vancouver for the sake of his marriage. However, his lifestyle was responsible for two failed marriages and an amphetamine addiction. Gage took his own life in 1964 at the age of thirty-seven.

The other thirteen include brothers Trump (trumpet) and Teddy (saxophone) Davidson, father and son Paul (saxophone) and P. J. Perry (saxophone), Herbie Spanier (trumpet), Wray Downes (piano), Larry Dubin (drums), Nelson Symonds (guitar), Guy Nadon (drums), Claude Ranger (drums), Sonny Greenwich (guitar), Brian Barley (tenor saxophone), and Ron Park (tenor saxophone). Miller draws from articles, but the essence of the book comes from his interviews with his subjects.

University of Toronto Quarterly contributor Jack Chambers wrote that with Jazz in Canada, Miller "showed us that jazz had roots here, that the Montreal jazz culture was distinct from the Toronto one, and that neither one owed its being to New York or took its definition from it. He showed us not by proclamations and reasoned arguments but by the simpler, and ultimately more convincing, method of interviewing the indigenes."

Books in Canada reviewer Robert Harlow called Jazz in Canada "a quite wonderful book, both in conception and in the telling of it.… Miller himself keeps a low profile. His is a narrator's voice that provides linkage and commentaries between episodes told by the musicians or their friends and colleagues, and only occasionally is he judgmental; he leaves that mostly to the jazz critics whose opinions are quoted throughout the text. Miller likes these musicians. He respects them and he knows them and their music well." Quill & Quire's Matthew Clark felt that Jazz in Canada "is indispensable for the serious student of Canadian music and enlightening for the general reader."

While Jazz in Canada is a study of an earlier era, Boogie Pete and the Senator: Canadian Musicians in Jazz: The Eighties is Miller's volume on Canadian jazz of the period in which it was written. Here he profiles forty musicians, including the undiscovered performers he feels show great promise. The volume is enhanced by forty-six black-and-white photographs, most taken of his subjects in performance. Richard N. Albert noted in a Small Press review that "Miller is not only a fine jazz critic, but also an accomplished photographer." The musicians of the title are Paul Gaudet (tenor saxophone), Oscar Peterson (piano), and Bob Brough (tenor saxophone). Books in Canada contributor David Roseman said, "Miller writes like a journalist, and when he writes about the music itself he achieves his most vigorous descriptions." Mark S. Harvey, writing in Notes, maintained that, "taken together," Miller's first two books "provide a fascinating overview of how an American art form has been embraced by Canadian musicians."

In Cool Blues: Charlie Parker in Canada, 1953 Miller documents two of "Bird"'s visits in 1953. The first, under the aegis of the Montreal Jazz Workshop, included a rare television appearance and club performance. The second found him at Massey Hall in Toronto with Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Max Roach in what has often been called "the greatest jazz concert ever."

With Such Melodious Racket: The Lost History of Jazz in Canada, 1914-1949, Miller begins with the first Canadian exposure to American jazz, when the Creole Band from New Orleans played at the Pantages Theatre in Winnipeg on an afternoon in 1914. Miller notes that Canadians learned jazz from musicians who came north from the States, and particularly from black musicians who enjoyed the respite from the racism they constantly struggled with at home. In researching this volume, Miller determined which musicians and bands came to Canada and where they played by pouring through theatre bills and advertisements from newspapers across the country.

In reviewing the book for Quill & Quire, Roger Burford Mason had one regret. He pointed to the colorful characters and history of jazz, and the stories that have come from them, and said the book "is much more sober than the music and musicians it celebrates. Yet in the end, thanks to Miller, for those of us who love jazz, no better description of it and its practitioners has yet been written."

The Miller Companion to Jazz in Canada and Canadians in Jazz includes more than 350 entries on musicians, record labels, venues, awards, and other statistics on the Canadian jazz scene. Globe and Mail's Greg Buium wrote, "Intelligent, articulate, and entirely engaging, the Miller Companion is the kind of guide this country's jazz communities have always deserved."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Books in Canada, January, 1983, Robert Harlow, review of Jazz in Canada: Fourteen Lives, pp. 14-16; June-July, 1988, David Roseman, review of Boogie Pete and the Senator: Canadian Musicians in Jazz: The Eighties, p. 8.

Canadian Book Review Annual, 2000, Jack S. Broumpton, review of Such Melodious Racket: The Lost History of Jazz in Canada, 1914-1949, p. 96.

Canadian Forum, December, 1997, Don McGregor, review of Such Melodious Racket, pp. 42-43.

Canadian Historical Review, December, 1983, Robert Cuff, review of Jazz in Canada, pp. 574-575.

Canadian Materials, September, 1988, Bessie Egan, review of Boogie Pete and the Senator, p. 178.

Choice, June, 1983, review of Jazz in Canada, p. 1467.

Coda, March-April, 2002, Greg Buium, "A National Landmark," pp. 14-17.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), December 8, 2001, Greg Buium, review of The Miller Companion to Jazz in Canada and Canadians in Jazz, p. D16.

Maclean's, November 1, 1982, Ian Pearson, review of Jazz in Canada, p. 64.

Notes, September, 1991, Mark S. Harvey, review of Jazz in Canada and Boogie, Pete and the Senator, p. 124.

Quill & Quire, February, 1983, Matthew Clark, review of Jazz in Canada, pp. 36-37; January, 1998, Roger Burford Mason, review of Such Melodious Racket, p 28.

Small Press, December, 1989, Richard N. Albert, review of Jazz in Canada and Boogie Pete and the Senator, pp. 48-49.

University of Toronto Quarterly, fall, 1990, Jack Chambers, review of Jazz in Canada, pp. 206-207.