My life has been quiet, I think. I was a competitive curler in my youth, so I knew some of the bigger names in the sport in Quebec (often curled against them), I have met some of the top curlers in Ottawa. My brother still curls, and has played against Rachel Homan (Canadian junior champion, Canadian and world women’s champion) in club games.
(Interesting note for @Wanderfound: the President and several times national champion of the Australian Curling Federation, Hugh Milliken, is from Ottawa, the Rideau Curling Club to be precise. Interesting note for the rest: yes, there is an Australian Curling Federation, and Oz used to get into the World Curling Championships from the Pacific region regularly until curling in Japan and China started taking off.)
The world of curling makes some strange connections: Bruce Cockburn’s mum used to curl for mine.
Otherwise, most of my connections were musical: I’ve been acquainted with Brian Greenway of April Wine for some 45 years. I met him through a mutual friend, Ted Quinlan, who is currently head of the guitar department at Humber College. Ted himself is one of those unsung types: he has played as a sideman for Freddie Baker, Chet Baker, Eddie Harris, Jimmy Smith, and Joey DeFrancesco, and was the guitarist on the album by Mike Downes that won the Juno for jazz album last year. I gather he’s visiting NYC at the moment, taking in the clubs and sitting in on a few sessions. I used to have the occasional brew and shoot the shit at Dag’s (aka Brasserie du Village) in Pointe-Claire with Gilles Schetagne, ex-Maneige, in the '80s. The English-speaking world won’t recognise the band, but they were well-known and well-regarded in la Francophonie. I knew Karen Young of “Karen Young and Michel Donato” fame (well, fame in Montreal, at any rate) in the mid-'70s.
In the late '70s, I had the opportunity to chat with the late Luther Allison between sets at the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto. Throughout the '70s, I ran across Bob Segarini in both Montreal and Hamilton. Bob was originally with the bands Roxy and the Wackers in LA, and came up to Montreal when the latter band moved as whole up here. On the breakup of the Wackers, he formed the Dudes with the Henman brothers, who had been with the original lineup of April Wine, and Brian Greenway, who went on to join April Wine (and is working with Myles Goodwyn still). He moved to Toronto to pursue a solo career sometime after I moved to Hamilton, and I haven’t seen him since I moved back to Montreal in 1980, although we still have mutual friends. Current Torontonians might recognise him as the Iceman on the radio - he has deejayed for CHUM-FM, Q107 and Sirius.
In the '80s, I met the other great jazz pianist from Little Burgundy, Oliver Jones, at Biddle’s in Montreal. (The great jazz pianist from Little Burgundy that everyone knows is Oscar Peterson. Oliver, I believe, studied piano with Oscar’s sister, Daisy.) It was rather amusing: a group of friends and I had headed down to Chinatown for dinner and clubbing, and we ended up at Biddles. As it happened, we had three piano tuners in our group, one of whom, also named Oliver, was Jones’s tuner. We had Jones, Charlie Biddles (the bassist and club owner) and Bernie Primeau (the drummer) joining our table between sets all night.
In Ottawa during the early '90s, I met Alanis Morisette and the parents of Angela Hewitt on the same night out for dinner at the Royal Ottawa Golf Course, where I was occasionally a guest. I saw Jean Chretien there, but can’t say that I met him. During that period, I used to run across Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s old Agriculture Minister, Eugene Whelan, frequently around downtown Ottawa (just the kind of nodding acquaintance you have with people you see on the street regularly).
On the classical side, I count composers Jay Anthony Gach (NYC) and Bernard Hughes (London) as longtime long distance acquaintances, also the harpsichordist Andrew Appel from the Hudson Valley area (same name as the computer sciences guy, not the same person). I have chatted occasionally with harpsichordists Ketil Haugsland and Skip Sempé. I met the late Swedish composer Bengt Hambraeus, who was member of the Swedish Academy and recipient of the King’s medal there, but spent most of his career in Montreal. Here in Ottawa, I am acquainted with Steven Gellman, who studied under Olivier Messiaen.
This brings up a case where I wish I had the chutzpah to introduce myself: back in the early '70s, I had season tickets to the Société de la Musique Contemporaine du Québec, and took in a concert of Messiaen’s work with his wife Yvonne Loriod on the Ondes Martenot. Guess who was in the audience not that far away? Another case was here about 10 years ago: there was a symposium on Schoenberg at Christ Church Cathedral, and his American kids, Nuria, Ronald and Lawrence, were in the audience. It would have been fascinating to chat with them, especially Nuria, who had married Luigi Nono.
