Musician/broadcaster Gavin Walker fills us in on his musical education and what the Vancouver jazz scene was like before the Classical Joint started hosting Thursday and Sunday night sessions.

North Shore News: How did you get interested in jazz?

Gavin Walker: “I grew up in Montreal and New York. My parents were musical — not necessarily jazzers — but they loved music and took me to concerts and stuff. I took piano lessons. I heard jazz on the radio and I didn’t identify it as jazz at the time but what I heard was very definitely jazz. There was lots and lots of great radio programs back in the day — this is in the ’50s. You could hear jazz everywhere and live broadcasts and so of course once I focused in on the music I realized I didn’t really want to play the piano I wanted to play saxophone. My dad was an excellent flute player. He played in the Grenadier Guards and all his brothers were excellent musicians — not professionals but good musicians. He knew the score and he said, ‘We’ll consider buying you a saxophone if you can become proficient on the clarinet,’ which is really good background for any saxophone player. He said, ‘If you can achieve some proficiency on that then we’ll consider buying you a saxophone.’ I mean all instruments are hard right. The clarinet can be pretty tricky and difficult but it’s a good starting point. Every saxophone player should study clarinet. So we went from there and then I started to play. I became pretty proficient on the clarinet and eventually moved to saxophone and flute which is what I basically play now, I play alto saxophone.”

North Shore News: What brought you out to Vancouver?

Gavin Walker: I came out here with my parents actually. In 1957 my dad was transferred out here. He was a CEO. He had to start a new plant for Philips Cables which are no more but they were a manufacturer of electric cables and they were opening a new factory out here so may dad took it over and that’s why we moved here.

North Shore News: What was Vancouver’s jazz scene like in late ’50s early ’60s?

Gavin Walker: “I was very lucky. I was ahead in school so my parents gave me a choice — I was too young to graduate. I would have been younger than most kids so I was able to take a year off high school which is really not a normal thing to do but because of my education back east I didn’t have to go to school for a year. My dad gave me a choice, ‘He said, do you want to go to school and graduate or wait a year and do it with people your own age?’ I was like, ‘Wait a year? I don’t have to go back to school?’

So I had lots of time on my hands which was fine because they were looking for a house and setting things up. I just happened to wander downtown one day and walked into a music store which was of course the natural place I would gravitate to. I intended to buy some records or just see what Vancouver had to offer. I had no idea what was here so I walked into Western Music in the 500-block of Seymour where the old A&B was. Western Music sold instruments and sheet music and records and I went to the records. I took the records over to the clerk and he said, ‘Wow a young guy and you’re interested in heavy jazz.’ I said, ‘Oh yea, I really like this guy.’ It was a saxophone player and he said ‘We have a jazz club here in Vancouver called the Cellar. I’m involved. I’m one of the charter members and I’m a saxophone player myself.’ It was pure luck that I met the heavy members of the jazz community right away. And then somebody walked into the store and he said, ‘This is my best friend, he’s a trumpet player and he’s part of the Cellar as well.’ So we all went for coffee. It was kind of a neat experience. We all sat around and then they said, ‘Why don’t you come and check out the Cellar? We are having a band rehearsal and you can just have a look at the club.’

From that time on I was involved with the Cellar. The Cellar was considered one of the leading jazz clubs in North America. The original Cellar, 222 East Broadway, the building is still standing. It’s that little street between Main and Kingsway called Watson Street, it’s like an alley. We had to go in the rear door. Some great people came there. I saw Ornette Coleman play his very first out-of-town gig at the Cellar and I happened to be there. I witnessed it. Ornette didn’t normally use a piano player but he had a piano player this time. His name is Don Friedman and he’s still alive and well in New York. He had Don Cherry and Billy Higgins on drums who was just a kid.

The interesting thing was there was a band that came before. Ornette came in November of ’57 and there was a band that summer called the Jazz Messiahs — it was just a great band and Don Cherry was in that band, Billy Higgins and a bass player named Don Payne and James Clay the legendary Texas tenor saxophonist. Cherry was playing trumpet and piano and that was a great band. They were playing your basic bebop repertoire. They were playing tunes like “Stablemates,” kind of a Jazz Messenger style, you know New York jazz. These guys were great. I was blown away but they were also playing a few very interesting tunes Cherry would make a big point of announcing, ‘This is a tune by a friend of ours you are going to hear about. His name is Ornette Coleman.’ I had never heard of the guy. Cherry talked to the musical director of the Cellar who was Dave Quarin and said, ‘Look I’ve got this friend, he’s a really interesting guy, his name is Ornette Coleman. He has his own music we would like to come here and play.’ And that’s how that gig took place.”

North Shore News: What was the Cellar like?

Gavin Walker: “Basically they brought in bands for four days like Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And in the case of Mingus he played a whole week. This was later on and of course that was packed out every night. The club became a real institution but by 1963 it was gone. Things changed and people moved on. It just kind of died.”

North Shore News: Who were some of the figures on the Vancouver jazz scene at the time?

Gavin Walker: “Al Neil, Jim Johnson, John Dawe a trumpet player. John was one of the greatest trumpet players I’ve ever heard. He’s still alive, I talk to John almost every day. Bill Boyle. Al Neil and John Dawe are still alive, so is Jim Johnson. They’re close to 80 now.”

North Shore News: These guys played the Cellar — would they have played the Classical Joint as well?

Gavin Walker: “No. There wasn’t that much of a connection between the old Cellar and the Classical Joint. It was two different generations — the Joint didn’t become really prominent until the ’70s.”

North Shore News: I understand it was literally a classical music venue first?

Gavin Walker: “I think that was the initial idea. I didn’t become aware of it until I went down there in the early ’70s. That was the original idea to have chamber music in there. It was a coffee house and they had poetry and folk music and classical music.”

North Shore News: What was between ’63 and the ’70s to fill the jazz void?

Gavin Walker: “There were all kinds of things that came and went. There was another club at the same time as the Cellar. We just had a big reunion of that back in August — a club called The Black Spot. A lot of the younger musicians including myself played at The Black Spot and that was in existence for about two years. Some of the musicians went on to play at the Cellar and some went on to fame and fortune like Terry Clarke the drummer. That was kind of a neat place. Again it was a coffee house. The Cellar wasn’t licensed either back in those days. Back in the ’50s and ’60s the only liquor licences were a few exclusive restaurants and hotels. Most of the night clubs were what they call bottle clubs. You brought your own and then bought mixer. The Cellar was like that.”

North Shore News: The strip clubs also hired jazz musicians.

Gavin Walker: “I worked both the Penthouse and Izzy’s and we just tried to play as much jazz as possible behind the girls. Some of them would come in with very specific musical requirements — I want this and I want this — some of them came in with rather ridiculous requests. Here we were an intrumental band and these girls would come in and would say, ‘I would like this Rolling Stones tune.’ And you’d say, ‘Well it doesn’t make much sense without somebody singing. We can play the tune but it’s going to sound like shit.’ We’d talk them out of it and we’d say ‘You can dance to this’ and we’d throw a jazz tune at them. We kind of fought for our musical thing. It was fun to play and it was fulfilling a function. I mean we had to play stuff they could dance to. This was before canned music — eventually in strip clubs they brought in canned music and that was the end of musicians.”

North Shore News: How did you personally get involved with the Classical Joint?

Gavin Walker: “I was working in a jazz rock band, a Blood, Sweat and Tears kind of band. We had a couple of weeks off. A buddy of mine, another saxophone player, and I were talking and he said, ‘You know there’s a little place in Gastown called the Classical Joint. We should go down there and check it out. We’ll bring our horns and we can probably sit in. Nick McGowan and I went down to the Classical Joint and the guy who was leading the band asked us to sit in. I didn’t really talk to the owners or anything, I thought it was a funky little place and didn’t think anything more about it.

Not long after that I was scouting around Gastown and there was another coffee house called Le Chat Noir. I talked to the owner who was a French national. I said, ‘I would be interested in playing, I see you have music here.’ He said, ‘Yea mostly folk music,’ because that was very popular at the time. ‘Would you think about doing a Sunday night jazz thing?’ He was open to it. And it wasn’t long after that that the Classical Joint started having Sunday night jazz. I guess there was a little bit of rivalry between the clubs.

The Classical Joint was out of my mind by this time because I had established this Sunday night gig at the Chat Noir. It did very well and I enjoyed playing there. It was a bigger venue. Remember where the Anchor Hotel was? Columbia and Powell. Le Chat Noir was in that building. I didn’t think too much about the Classical Joint then I guess it was six months or so later I got a phone call from Wyatt Ruther, internationally known bass player, who lived here in Vancouver and he said, ‘Would you be into playing a Sunday night at the Classical Joint with Linton Garner, myself and Liston Pickering’ — who was a great drummer from the West Indies. I said, ‘Yea I’ll be there.’ Charles at the Chat Noir wasn’t all that happy I had to book off that Sunday. I got another band in there, so that was fine. He was kind of like, ‘Oh you’re playing at the Classical Joint?’ So that was my real first taste of the Classical Joint.”

jgoodman@nsnews.com