Working the Dead Beat (14 page)

The tale is a tall one, according to biographer Lees, who speculates that Granz was in Montreal specifically to catch Peterson's trio at the Alberta lounge. Peterson was known to several of Granz's other recording artists, and the Lounge, located around the corner from Windsor Station, was a popular destination for train-riding jazz lovers from both sides of the border, including Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, and Coleman Hawkins. Whether the story is true hardly matters. It is a good yarn, Peterson and Granz stood by it, and the meeting was propitious for both men and for jazz.

Granz persuaded Peterson to expand beyond bop and embrace boogie-woogie and to appear as a “surprise” guest at one of his “Jazz at the Philharmonic” concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York City in September 1949. Peterson couldn't get a work visa to play professionally, so Granz planted him in a seat among the audience, pretended to spot his protegé, and invited him onstage to play as a favour to the crowd. Peterson played “Fine and Dandy” and “Tenderly,” among other pieces. The crowd went wild, giving him his first big break in the U.S. market less than a month after his twenty-fourth birthday. Reporter Mike Levin wrote in
DownBeat
that Peterson had “stopped” the concert “dead cold in its tracks” with “a flashy right hand, a load of bop,” and a good “sense of harmonic development” and had “scared some of the local modern minions by playing bop ideas in his
left
hand, which is distinctly not the common practice.” That performance was immortalized on
Jazz at the Philharmonic
.

Early the following year, Peterson won the
DownBeat
readers' poll for the first of numerous times. Granz was Peterson's manager for most of Peterson's career, in a relationship that was as inspirational as it was rewarding. Granz, whose heritage was Jewish and Ukrainian, knew about prejudice and wasn't prepared to tolerate racism, especially when it affected his passion, which was jazz. He took freewheeling jam sessions out of after-hours clubs and put them on tour and into concert halls all over the U.S., refusing to accept bookings in segregated halls.

Granz's “Jazz at the Philharmonic” (
JATP
) tours and recordings of live concerts eventually travelled to Canada, Europe, and Japan. He made stars of many of his players, none more so than Peterson, finding them audiences far beyond their jazz base. He owned several record labels over the years: Clef, Norgran, Verve, and Pablo. As Peterson's manager, mentor, and friend, Granz was the one who suggested he should form his first major trio, with Ray Brown and Herb Ellis.

Peterson's career was soaring, but the incessant touring and performing played havoc with his home life. He had married Lillie Fraser, the daughter of a Montreal-based railway porter, in September 1944, when he was barely nineteen. The marriage couldn't survive the loneliness they both endured: she in a small apartment coping with five small children, he on the road for weeks at a time. He moved his family to Toronto in 1958 and tried to stay put by founding the Advanced School of Contemporary Music. He liked teaching, but touring and performing live were his adrenalin. Both the marriage and the school gave way to his international playing and recording schedule. In later years he was a mentor in the jazz program at York University and was chancellor of the university from 1991 to 1994.

Peterson played at the top of his form until his late sixties, but then ill-health began to catch up with him. He'd had arthritis in his hands since childhood, but it became more pronounced in his seventies. His expanding girth — his weight crept up to 280 pounds — affected his mobility so much that the journey from backstage to the piano often became painful to observe. He had hip-replacement surgery in the early 1980s.

Peterson was playing at the Blue Note in New York in May 1993 when he felt a strange sensation in his left side and realized his left hand wasn't responding to the music. He had suffered a stroke, which severely weakened his left side and robbed him of his two-fisted technique. At first he was depressed, but he was determined to overcome his disability. Within two years he was performing and recording “Side by Side” with violinist Itzhak Perlman and touring again, although at a much less frantic pace.

In 2003 he recorded
A Night in Vienna
with Niels-Henning Pedersen, Ulf Wakenius, and Martin Drew. He continued to tour, with rests between concerts to restore his strength. Among his accompanists were Wakenius on guitar, David Young on bass, and Alvin Queen on drums. There was a celebration with about two hundred friends for his eightieth birthday in 2005. Diana Krall sang “Happy Birthday” and performed a vocal version of his song “When Summer Comes,” with lyrics written by her husband, Elvis Costello. That same year Canada Post issued a stamp in his honour, the first time a living person other than royalty had been commemorated in that way.

By 2007 kidney disease forced him to cancel a performance at the Toronto Jazz Festival and an appearance at a Carnegie Hall all-star concert in his honour. A little more than two weeks after he died of kidney failure — at home in Mississauga, Ontario, on December 23, 2007 — musical greats including Herbie Hancock, Nancy Wilson, and Quincy Jones assembled in a memorial concert at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto. More than 2,500 people attended the free concert, many of them having lined up for hours to pay tribute to Canada's foremost jazz musician.

 

Maureen Forrester

Contralto

July 25, 1930 – June 16, 2010

N
OBODY WILL EVER
know where Maureen Forrester's voice came from, what combination of genetics and serendipity produced the marvellous velvet sound that will live on as long as recordings and digital archives last. What's important is what Forrester did with her gift, working as a clerk to pay for singing lessons, training with the best coaches she could find, travelling the world to perform — at her peak, she gave 120 concerts a year. No matter how crowded the auditorium, she poured the immensity of her emotions into her music, as though she was singing directly into the ear of each member of the audience.

A contralto who made Mahler her own, she “had a singular beauty of sound, intensity of musical focus and a haunting darkness of feeling,” according to conductor Sir Andrew Davis. “She could fill the softest pianissimo with an eerie carrying power” and she “could weave a spell better than anyone,” he told the
Globe and Mail
after her death in 2010.

Forrester, who dropped out of school at thirteen, could quickly master the most difficult music and sing fluently in several languages an expansive and versatile repertoire that included everything from lieder to oratorios to opera to torch ballads. She even belted out “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” at Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's “shamrock summit” with U.S. president Ronald Reagan in Quebec City in 1985.

A buxom, flamboyant woman with a magnetic presence on or off the stage, Forrester looked like a Valkyrie but performed like a professional. She was the opposite of a haughty and imperious prima donna. She appeared under the baton of international maestros that included Bruno Walter, Eugene Ormandy, Leonard Bernstein, Andrew Davis, Mario Bernardi, and Seiji Ozawa and sang with nearly every major orchestra in the West and the East, in the northern and southern hemispheres, and on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Primarily known for her mastery of German lieder and her interpretation of Mahler, Forrester was also a celebrated opera singer, although roles for contraltos invariably take second place to soprano parts. She made her Canadian debut as Orpheus in
Orpheus and Eurydice
at the O'Keefe Centre in Toronto in 1962. Other significant roles were Cornelia in
Julius Caesar
for the New York Opera in 1966, Erda in
Das Rheingold
at the Metropolitan Opera in 1975, and the Countess in
The Queen of Spades
at La Scala in 1990. She embraced the role of the witch in Norman Campbell's
CBC
production of
Hansel and Gretel
(a role she reprised at the Guelph Spring Festival in 1979) with such gusto that friends of her children regularly asked her if she could fly around the living room on her broom.

Internationally recognized and honoured at home with a succession of prizes and awards, including Companion of the Order of Canada, she always gave back, promoting the works of Canadian composers such as Harry Somers, R. Murray Schafer, Murray Adaskin, and Alexander Brott. When she was at the peak of her international acclaim, she served an arduous five-year term as chair of the Canada Council for the Arts from 1983 to 1988, putting her name and her energy on the line to boost the careers of other artists, to protect the arm's-length principle from government interference and lobbying hard for more public money and support for the arts. She also served as chancellor of Wilfrid Laurier University from 1986 to 1990, as well as donating time, money, and effort to myriad artistic causes.

No singer was too insignificant for her to encourage and coach; no audience was too small or too remotely located to command her presence. In 1994, when she had been a galactic star for nearly three decades, she accepted an invitation to sing in an operetta in Chicoutimi, Quebec. “They think, ‘She'll never come,'” she said at the time. “But of course I'll come. These crowds are wonderful. They wait all year for you.”

As frank about her facelifts as she was about her affairs, she jokingly bemoaned that she was invariably cast in the roles of “mothers, maids, witches, bitches, mediums, nuns, aunts and pants” but rarely as the bride. A lifetime of frenetic busyness, as she juggled home and career, became endemic for a woman who was intelligent but not an intellectual, who could focus intensely to learn a new piece of music but wasn't really interested in reading for pleasure or stimulation.

There was more to her frantic schedule than a love of audience and applause. She never forgot her church choir roots, remaining grateful for the opportunities she had been given as a teenager to sing in chapels and halls. Besides all that, she was the financial support for a brood of six children. In her prime she could command towering fees, but the expenses for her gowns, accompanists, travel, and housekeepers were huge. She had to keep working.

Although she loved luxury — her former husband, violinist Eugene Kash, once said she “lived on the gross and never considered the net” — she also relished scrubbing her own kitchen floor. For Canadians she was that rarest of creatures in the 1970s and '80s — a working mother with an international career who insisted on making her home in Canada.

MAUREEN KATHERINE STEWART
Forrester was born on Fabre Street in the impoverished east end of Montreal on July 25, 1930, the youngest of four children of Thomas Forrester, a Glasgow-born cabinetmaker, and his wife, Marion Forrester (née Arnold), an aspiring singer from Belfast. Times were tough for the Scottish-Irish immigrant family in the wake of the stock market crash, and they didn't get better through the long, lean years of the Depression.

Forrester went to William Dawson Elementary School. By the age of eleven she was working after school and on weekends selling cigarettes and ice cream cones in a corner store on Laurier Street, earning enough to indulge in lipstick and twin sweater sets and to try smoking, a habit she never acquired because she couldn't inhale.

School bored her and she craved financial independence, so she quit at thirteen and got the first of a succession of clerical jobs, handing over her weekly paycheque to her parents, who gave her back a small amount as an allowance. Her life might have trundled along happily and anonymously enough had her older brother Arnold not intervened. Back from fighting overseas in the Second World War, he heard her singing as she went about her household chores and noticed that her voice had changed from soprano to alto. He suggested she take singing lessons from a woman named Sally Martin, and he offered to pay for them. Years later, after Forrester had begun paying for the lessons herself, she learned the real reason for her brother's patronage: he was keen to meet one of Martin's other students.

She began earning a little money singing in church choirs and found a new teacher in Frank Rowe, who improved her breathing technique and diction. Soon she began getting paid engagements on
CBC
radio and other places and entering competitions. At eighteen, while working as a secretary and switchboard operator at Bell Telephone, she realized she might make a career as a singer, a path she pursued with gusto and determination.

Eventually she found her way to voice teacher Bernard Diamant, a Dutch baritone who had fled Europe after the war. As she related in her 1986 memoir,
Out of Character
(with Marci McDonald), he listened to her sing and pronounced: “You certainly have a gift from God. That's a very big voice. But I must tell you something, my dear. You don't know how to sing.” His first remedy was to order Forrester to quit her bread-and-butter freelance gigs and to stop singing entirely for at least six months. Her mother was horrified by the loss of income, but Forrester realized that Diamant was “building the inner core of my voice, expanding the range up and down.” Finally Daimant let her sing and asked his accomplished musician friend John Newmark to work as her accompanist.

A German Jew from Bremen, Newmark had fled to England just before the war. Detained there as an enemy alien, he had been shipped to an internment camp outside Lennoxville, Quebec. Hitler's Nazis had destroyed Newmark's chances of a solo career; instead he provided Forrester and several others with the backing, support, and confidence of his superb training and musicianship. As an accompanist he provided “an integral part of each song, without being guilty of either too much or too little,” as
Globe
critic John Kraglund said in a 1960 review.

Although they didn't like each other at first, Newmark and Forrester overcame their separate hostilities and developed a close friendship and an enduring partnership, touring the country and the world for many years. With Newmark accompanying her, Forrester made her recital debut in 1953 at the Montreal
YWCA
. Thomas Archer, music critic for the
Montreal Gazette
, wrote: “Few if any contraltos on this continent could challenge her.” He became the first to compare her voice favourably to the great English contralto Kathleen Ferrier.

That recital, at age twenty-three, marked the true beginning of Forrester's career. It led directly to an invitation to make her concert debut, singing the small but significant alto part in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra under the ageing and ailing but still magnificent Otto Klemperer in December 1953. She also won a touring contract to sing forty-five concerts at schools in northern Ontario and Quebec with Jeunesses Musicales du Canada. She made $25 per concert and learned essential techniques — how to pace a concert, hold the attention of the audience, modify the program according to what succeeded and what failed — and acquired discipline and endurance from performing day after day in small towns.

Forrester's next boost came from J. W. McConnell, the founder and publisher of the
Montreal Star
, who became her secret patron and benefactor (even paying her father's funeral expenses) so that she could have the time and the resources to continue studying voice. In her memoir, Forrester estimates that McConnell gave her at least $25,000 over the next several years — a sizable sum in the 1950s. “The big breaks came to me on their own,” she wrote, “but they would have taken five years longer without J. W.”

After touring extensively throughout Canada and Europe with Jeunesses Musicales, she made her New York City debut at the Town Hall on November 12, 1956, with McConnell supplying the $1,800 rental for the auditorium. She sang some Schubert, some Britten, and some Wagner and earned rave reviews, including a headline in the
New York Times
: “Canadian Contralto Displays Superb Voice.” Critic Edward Downes praised the “generous compass and volume” of her voice and described her range as moving “from a darkly resonant chest register to a brilliantly focused top with a middle register that she makes velvet soft or reedy according to her expressive intent.”

By then Bruno Walter, the German-born conductor and protegé of Gustav Mahler, had invited Forrester to sing for him. He coached her for a recording of Mahler's Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”), helping her develop her signature interpretation and technique. She also recorded Mahler's “Das Lied von der Erde” with Walter and sang at his farewell performances as a conductor with the New York Philharmonic in 1957.

While her career was on a trajectory into the stratosphere, her romantic life was on an operatic roller coaster. The cause was violinist and conductor Eugene Kash. They had met at a concert she gave on a Sunday afternoon in a high school gym in Ottawa in 1953. He was eighteen years her senior and “not the marrying kind,” as he frequently reminded her. Besides, his mother would never approve of her son marrying a Gentile.

He had no such qualms about an affair. When Forrester became pregnant, Kash tried to persuade her to have an abortion. Failing that, he wanted her to put the child up for adoption. Instead Forrester secretly kept the baby, named Paula, in Germany while keeping up a rigorous European concert schedule — she sang a concert five days after the birth — and did her best to raise the little girl on her own. She again became pregnant by Kash in 1956 — these were the days before reliable birth control was readily available — and this time she did have an abortion.

Kash finally married her in London, England, on July 20, 1957, after the death of his mother and when the daughter he barely knew was two years old. Having finally given in, Kash became a devoted papa to their increasing brood; he later described himself as “one of the original stay-at-home dads.” Forrester had five children in nine years and, by her own admission, would have had six if she hadn't fallen down the stairs and suffered a miscarriage.

Beginning in 1961, Forrester and Kash began appearing together at the annual Casals Festival in Puerto Rico, a commitment they kept up for nearly fifteen years. They moved their family to Pennsylvania while they both taught at the Philadelphia Academy of Music, among other assignments, from 1967 through 1971. After their return to Canada, Forrester taught voice students at the University of Toronto and gave master classes at the University of Alberta and in many other locations when she was visiting as a performer. Mainly though, husband and children stayed in Toronto while Forrester travelled the world, giving concerts in countries as varied as Australia, China, and the former Soviet Union.

The Kashes separated in the mid-1970s, when she left him after developing a
grande passion
for a married man. That affair ended badly three years later, when her lover dumped Forrester (and his wife) for a younger and richer woman. Forrester was devastated and for one of the few times in her life gave in to her emotions off the stage, lying on a chaise in her garden and weeping for three days while her children watched frantically, thinking she had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. “I felt like a bloody fool,” she wrote in her memoir, for breaking up her marriage with Eugene — a “good and scrupulously honest” man who “truly loved” her — in favour of a “deceitful character.” Nevertheless, she and Kash remained close until he died in 2004 at the age of ninety-one.