In anticipation of the Canadian Brass’ upcoming appearance April 27, the final concert in this year’s Mooredale Concert Series, I tracked tuba player Chuck Daellenbach down for a thoroughly entertaining hour-long chat at his south Rosedale Toronto home, middle of March 2014.
What follows is a full length transcript of that chat: a conversation that roamed here and there over the whole 44 years of the Brass’ existence: commissioning and arranging, their momentous 1977 groundbreaking trip to China, recording, media, player personnel and more. Or you can click HERE for a flip through replica of the article the way it appears in the April 2014 print edition of The WholeNote Magazine. (Story commences on page 11.) Either way, what follows gives a taste of the indefatigable Daellenbach, now the only member of the original quintet still in full-time performing harness with what is undoubtedly the best-known Canadian chamber ensemble of our (and perhaps all) time. Enjoy.
DP: Hello, this is David Perlman, for “Conversations at the WholeNote”, and I’m here with Chuck Daellenbach, one of the founding members of the Canadian Brass, and the only remaining founding member of the Canadian Brass still active fulltime, since 2010 anyway. It’s lovely to be here, thank you.
CD: Thank you.
DP: I told your agent at IMG in New York to pass on the message – I don’t know whether he did or not – that I was going to want to start all the way back in the Betty Webster days. : So why don’t we start with the Betty Webster days. That was, what, 1971?
CD: Well, the Canadian Brass was very fortunate in that the Hamilton Plan was in effect. And the Hamilton Plan had been put together by some very civic-minded people in Hamilton in the late ’60s. The idea was to have every child in a 60-mile radius of Hamilton (excluding Toronto) hear a string group brass group, woodwind group, percussion group in their school every year and then come into the concert hall at the end of the year to hear an orchestra. And before the Hamilton plan disbanded they had actually achieved that in a 30-mile radius, and it became a model for other communities, showcased for example at the official orchestra jamboree, like OFSO, the Ontario Federation of Symphony Orchestras, it was the international one, actually showcased the Hamilton Plan because it was so successful and it was such a great idea.
DP: So this revolved around the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra, did it?
CD: Yes. Betty Webster was the executive director of that program, and the Paikin family in Hamilton were very instrumental in putting this plan together. And then they brought in a young conductor at that time to be the voice, the mouthpiece for the program, they needed someone to be the face of the program [Boris Brott]. And then had in their chamber orchestra, a fulltime professional chamber orchestra, was a string quartet – it was the Czech string quartet – and a woodwind group, and that’s where the Canadian Brass fit in, the Canadian Brass became the resident ensemble…
DP: So you were the section leaders effectively within the orchestra, and the sections had to kind of earn their keep by going out into schools as section ensembles?
CD: Well, originally it was almost the opposite, which was what was amazing, is that traditionally [hiring professional section leaders] is a way to put an orchestra together. In this case, it was [first and foremost] a way to get music out into the schools, they really wanted to get to the kids. And then the fact that the professional musicians had a base of reference meant they could be then part of the resident orchestra, that’s what kept it together. And because of the proximity to Toronto, it could expand to an 80-, 90-piece orchestra because the commercial scene in Toronto was so vibrant, second only at the time to New York City because of the Canadian content. I kind of diverge here but Canadian content rules meant that you couldn’t just drag an American Coca-Cola ad up to Canada and put it on TV, you had to redo it. So we had a very active musician base right here. That gave the opportunity to have full-fledged orchestra concerts; you could do Rachmaninoff and Mahler and so forth and it’s quite possible. But it was based on this twenty piece professional core that actually lived in Hamilton and was going out into the schools.
DP: And so how were you recruited – when did you actually start with Hamilton?
CD: Well, Gene Watts, our trombonist, had been talking to the Ontario Arts Council, at that time Lou Appelbaum was running the Arts Council. And Lou really had his ear to the ground, he understood what was happening here. And he and Gene were discussing this, and Lou said, they really need a spearhead for this program, because they have the idea, they’ve got the musicians, but now they really need to make it work. And he thought, this would be perfect for Gene to latch into this. Because Gene had put together at that point a quartet, without a tuba, he’d been trying to figure out how to put a group together, and he went to Hamilton and actually they took him on to do the school part of that residency. So that’s where I came in, I became the fifth part. I met Gene very early that fall, in 1970. I thought I was auditioning him to put a group together because my idea was I was at the University of Toronto, I thought wouldn’t it be great to have a resident ensemble. And meanwhile he’s thinking, we really need a tuba player to make this thing work, so we were both looking at each other like, hmm let’s consider this…and became lifelong friends ever since.
DP: You mentioned the Czech string quartet; was this was a group that had pre-existed in Prague prior to the Russian invasion and they’d left at that time?
CD: You know, I don’t actually know, but I do know they had a position at McMaster University, that was part of the deal. So for them they had a teaching position plus the orchestra. Marta Hidy was the concertmistress and she as well had this dual appointment. For us it was a little different. I was teaching at the university and Gene was very involved in the New Music Concerts with Bob Aitken. So we were able to piece this together in various ways and make this go. But what was unique at that time was, we were on the ground floor of really what’s become [since then] a brass explosion. We were very fortunate in that we did not have a peer group here in Canada. There weren’t people standing in the wings telling us what we needed to play. So we didn’t get trapped into this very small repertoire for brass that really was a dead end for brass groups, particularly in the States. We were only allegiant to the audience. We knew we had to build an audience, and we had to find music that could make that possible. So we took a masterpiece approach, we thought if we were going to borrow music, it might as well be the very, very best. And we set out, on the one hand commissioning. We’ve commissioned over 70 major works. That doesn’t mean they automatically get on the concert stage, in fact quite the opposite. The likelihood of a masterpiece showing up is slim. Out of those 70 works, maybe we have four or five that we would say are really lasting the test of time. And meanwhile we have the Bach and the Handel and so forth that we’ve raided and we’ve put together repertoire, and Hamilton was a perfect place to experiment.
DP: So, you were teaching at the Faculty of Music, but Gene was already connected in with Betty Webster and the Hamilton Plan…?
CD: Oddly enough, he was just going to Hamilton. In fact when I got to Toronto to start teaching I had a friend here that was in the orchestra at the time. And he had tipped me off, he said, you know, when you’re looking around for things to do for playing, he said, you should contact the Hamilton Orchestra. He says, I see the Hamilton Orchestra on television more than the Toronto Symphony. Because they had CHCH down there that was doing a lot of stuff. So I did; I called and they said, well, just by luck we need a tuba player down here, why don’t you come out and play for us. So the very first rehearsal was also the first rehearsal for this idea of the brass group being in Hamilton. So we met virtually at the same time and coming from quite different perspectives, but it crystallized. And it gave the Brass a home base. It meant we didn’t have to run off and do five different things and then get together at one am. And we’ve said this many times, (in fact the New York Times was quite interested in this concept); we said we really got our training…we got to Carnegie hall playing children concerts. We’re probably the only professional group in the world that ever looked at children’s concerts as an opportunity to improve as artists. It’s usually sharing your art and so forth, you’re looking down on kids and saying, oh kids, how can we help you how can you? We looked at the opposite. It’s like, we’re there, how can you help us? Tell us, we need to know! Is this a piece of music that you like? And they would tell you, not using those words, but you knew very quickly if your music was connecting or not, and it was a fantastic laboratory.
DP: And if you could win a gymnasium in Burlington, Carnegie Hall would be easy pickings afterward?
CD: Right.
DP: You were talking about repertoire, finding pieces that fit the voices of the instruments and not being bound into a tiny little cluster of music that happened to have been written for brass quintet …so who carried the burden of the arranging in those early years while you were building your repertoire?
CD: Well, the burden of concept started with Gene. Gene had as a musician a very unusual insight into what was needed; [if] we would make $100 dollars as a group he would hold back $10 dollars, let’s say, kind of for research and development. We always had a little bit of money to hire writers, so we had professional writers working with us. Very early on, a very important writer for us was Howard Cable. Cable was such a known entity already, and Howard, the music’s already in his head, he just needs to get it on the paper. He’s like Mozart, it just flows. So he wrote some very important works for us in the early years. And then Fred Mills joined our group. Fred had grown up in Guelph and spent about 10 years in New York City. Came back to play in the Ballet orchestra, ended up in the National Arts Centre, he was the principle trumpet when they opened up in ’69, he was their trumpet player. And he was quite motivated to join us. He brought along a love of opera for example, and he was a very fine arranger. And the two things that came together there was that he had played with Stokowski, in Houston, Texas, he had been his principle trumpet. And Stokowski of course was known himself for arranging. He’d do Bach’s Toccata and Fugue with the orchestra, and so these are well-known arrangements that got him into film. This had a very big influence for Fred and he wanted to do similar things for the brass quintet, for example the Toccata and Fugue which is now probably the number one standard brass quintet. Every group in the world owns and plays Fred’s arrangement of Toccata and Fugue, it’s absolutely the number one most important piece in the repertoire. And that was Fred wanting to bring that one; when we first met up with that piece it seemed impossible, we thought this would not be possible. Now kids grow up with it and they just think it’s, as you would expect, normal.
Another influence early on, we were very fortunate to be picked up by Eleanor Sniderman, Sam the Record Man’s wife who had started a classical label. And this is in the day when you couldn’t make your own recordings in your basement, it was quite important to have an LP. She wanted to record us, and she wanted some repertoire ideas from us. And we were playing for her one day in a church up north here, and we started the Art of the Fugue because we always wanted to record it; we thought Art of the Fugue would be so perfect. So we played a 4-minute Contrapuntus, no 1. And we get all done: ok…Eleanor, what did you think? She said, well when I heard your first three notes, I thought you were going to play the Little Fugue in g minor, now that would be a perfect piece for you. So we thought, hmm, ok! So Ronnie [Romm], our trumpet player, made an arrangement of the Little Fugue and that became the premiere piece on our first recording. And again, it’s an absolute standard repertoire piece that we in fact ourselves will be playing this spring. I mean, it’s just an essential composition for brass. Repertoire is interesting, you keep your ears open. People are often very eager to tell you what they think might work, and sometimes it turns out wonderfully.
DP: Looking through your videos on YouTube, it’s jaw-dropping these days. What’s interesting in that regard is the control you seem to have over your YouTube identity. A lot of artists don’t have that, you’re at the mercy of every handheld concert cellphone video. But you’ve got over 80 videos, which have a clear Canadian Brass identity to them.
CD: Well, it’s a little like hoarding, but we were the only brass quintet, maybe to this day almost that’s been on all the networks; we’ve had major television shows. CBC, back in the day when CBC was making shows, they actually had the Canadian Brass show, these would be major productions with costuming and guest artists, and all this sort of thing. We’ve been very fortunate to be part of that medium. I think growing up in Toronto, growing up in Canada, in the early 70s was an amazing time. The governments were right, we had the right people in the right places to support arts. The CBC was invaluable. By the time we got to New York in ’75 we had so much training in studios and so forth that a radio appearance was just second nature. I remember one where it was great fun: WQXR, the famous classical station in New York City, Fridays at noon or something they would have a one hour live concert situation and they’d feature this artist or that artist so we were featured one Friday afternoon, and we showed up, and they showed us the studio and we set up our music stands, and got our music out, put the horns out and warmed up a little bit, and then we asked if we could find the coffee room, sandwich or something and they sent us off. So we were enjoying our coffee, and this panicked guy comes in, we’ve been looking for you guys, the show’s going to start any minute and you’ve got to get up here! There still was like 15 minutes to go, we were like, are you kidding, we’ve got 15 minutes. To them this was so, you know, this live show, people panic, and we had done so much CBC at that point. You know, we were known nationwide before we got out of Toronto. “This Country in the Morning”, Peter Gzowski’s show, we were known in households throughout the country from several appearances on that radio program. I don’t know, maybe that happened, did it happen in the ’50s for American artists, maybe they got on Arthur Godfrey’s morning show or something, but that was invaluable.
DP: What struck me looking at [our YouTube] videos was where it says for all of them, if you want this, here’s how to buy it on Tunes, or if you want the CD, and then, most striking to me, [here’s how to get] the sheet music. That struck me as being another really interesting contribution that you’ve made over the years. You were talking about the Toccata and Fugue, that in the beginning it was a challenge for you but now, I assume via the availability of the sheet music, it becomes accessible to a generation.
CD: Very early on, I guess what set us apart from a lot of other groups is that we did spend a lot of time talking about and thinking about all the possibilities in the music world. I mean, now they have courses for it in colleges, they didn’t back then. It’s really taking charge, shaping your own destiny. And it seemed to us, that if it was hard for us to find music, and we were making a profession out of this! How about people that are just getting started, music teachers for example, if it’s hard for us it’s got to be impossible for them. So we did spend a lot time thinking about how we could make the music more accessible. We always thought, people would ask us about competition - aren’t you worried about competition if people start playing your music? and we said, well our competition is really Hockey Night in Canada. If you’re looking at other brass groups you’d be looking way too low. What we felt we needed was a bit of an explosion of brass just so that you would have a place in a hierarchy. When you’re kind of on your own, people don’t know if you’re great, mediocre, middle, normal, anybody could do it, they have no idea. But suddenly if you have 200 brass groups you start to develop a taste and an interest in the medium. So that was really what we were trying to encourage. I know there was a tuba solo that I had in Largo al Factotum, a big tuba solo. And we printed it and in fact the printed part came out before the recording, well before, and we got to Berlin, Germany and this tuba player wanted to meet me: he said, I was astonished to find this piece of music, you gave away your best solo, how could you do that? And I said, well, are you playing it? And he said, yes. I said, that’s great, now people will know this piece that works for tuba, this is great! It was kind of a turnaround, usually in the pop world for example you hide the music, the last thing you want is for it to get out ahead of you. We were thinking that sometimes the opposite is better, it’s nice if people know what they’re listening to before you get there.
DP: Let’s talk about recording…I went down the list of [the Canadian Brass’s] recording companies; you were mentioning Eleanor Sniderman, was that Boot?
CD: Yes, Boot. And you know how it got the name Boot? Ok, so this is a bit of a story, but: Sam the Record Man of course was a very good promoter of Canadian talent, he was well-known for that. So every manager and so forth would come through the shop. And Eleanor said working in the store with her husband, she said the most plugged-in kind of “on it” manager that would come through was Stompin’ Tom Connors’ manager, a fellow named Jury Krytiuk. And she said that Jury was very conscientious, really attentive, anything that they talked about he would see to it that it got done and so forth, so when she was looking for a company to work with she thought of Jury. So the Boot label was Stompin’ Tom’s boot, and it became the Boot Master Concert series. And the first artists were Liona Boyd, Anton Kuerti and the Canadian Brass. The Kuerti project I think was too big an undertaking, I think it was the entire Beethoven sonatas or some very large work, very expensive, but for us it meant when we went to New York we had an LP under our arm. So when we were meeting managements we were actually presenting an LP and this was a major calling card. We got meetings with every major management going at the time, Columbia Artists, ICM, IMG, the Sol Hurok Company ... we got to see all these people because we had an LP, to get the opportunity.
DP: Speaking of Kuerti. You talked already about spring concerts, and part of the reason for wanting to talk to you again at this time was because you have this concert coming up with Mooredale, which is named for Mooredale House which is just around the corner from where you’ve been living for close to 20 years. And I wondered about that connection; did that go back to the Sniderman days, that you knew Anton [Kuerti] and Kristine [Bogyo]?
CD: Anton might want to deny it but he and I were actually colleagues at the university. Because I started teaching there in 1970 and of course he was the primary piano draw, no question about that. And I think he was a senior professor and I was a junior lecturer or something, but nonetheless, we were colleagues.
DP: By the way, one of my columnists, Jack MacQuarrie, who does our Bandstand column, remembers as a mature student taking a course with you. He remembers it as the late ’60s but you’re saying you started in 1970 on the nose. He was playing bass trombone ... But, staying with Mooredale, this concert that you’re doing towards the end of April, their formula is the two concerts in the day. There’s the children’s concert, the Music with Truffles, earlier in the day, and then the full concert later in the afternoon, and that struck me as being so closely related to the philosophy that you were talking about.
CD: That’s our modus operandi, right? Yes, indeed. I think there was a fellow in the Canadian diplomatic service that summed it up in Germany. Very often when we’re doing foreign concerts we’ll have a whole delegation built around one of these trade missions or one thing or another and it’s not even an official relationship to us, but they’ll see that we’re in town and they have the confidence to book their dinners and their business meetings and so forth around that and bring their whole entourage to our concerts. So one night we were actually talking to one of these diplomats and we said, well, what’s the word on street, and he says, well, we decided some years ago you’re not going to be really loud like a rock and roll group, and on the other hand you’re not going to be boring like a string quartet so it’s perfect. I said, well that’s an odd way to put it but, okay. It means that we’re doing something that can be both musically valid and entertaining and hits all of those marks. And I think that that’s kind of been our role in the musical world is that we do have our feet firmly planted in the classical world but we’ve been on our own. We’re not a subsidized group, we don’t have that kind of relationship, so it means we need an audience. So on the one hand we have the same pressure that a popular kind of group would have yet we’re firmly cemented in the classical tradition and there was our challenge. That’s quite a goal. When we were starting through all the early ’70s we’d very often rehearse at the school of music downtown here. And we became very good friends with the Orford String Quartet because they rehearsed there all the time. They had a government grant and one thing or another to rehearse; we were there rehearsing because we had a concert, we needed to get a concert together. That’s quite a different role in the musical world.
DP: Speaking of feet firmly planted, how many pairs of white running shoes have you gone through since 1970?
CD: Oh my gosh. It started with the Ballet, you know. We all got our start in the pits, playing for the National Ballet, so we fell in love with the music, and it was [just a matter of time before the Brass was] going to play ballet music so we had a set of pieces put together, mostly Tchaikovsky of course. Then we thought, well you know, it’s not fair to just play the music; these composers intended something beyond just playing. Of course we didn’t know what that would be, because when we played the music [in the Ballet] we were under the stage. We could hear feet moving around, but we had no idea what those feet were doing. So we invited ballet dancers to our rehearsals and then they would tell us what they do during the music and we would try to duplicate what they were suggesting. And we discovered that if we did our very best to do exactly what they told us, people thought it was funny. So we put our ballet together and it became standard. But they did insist, and one thing we paid attention to, they wanted us to wear those Capezio jazz ballet slippers, very light, easy to carry, they were nice. They were pretty comfortable. But people thought we were wearing sneakers. So we thought, well, if they think that anyway, sneakers are even more comfortable, so we started wearing those. And then we thought, well you know, it’s taking too long between the piece of music and then the ballet to change, why don’t we just put them on at intermission? And then we thought, you know, they’re so comfortable let’s just wear them for the whole concert. And the rest is history.
DP: Yeah, interesting. And it is, in a way it encapsulates the relationship, the feet on the ground as you said.
CD: Well, here’s a sort of a marketing success story except it wasn’t a success for us. One of my colleagues was having a chat – we were down in Florida doing something – and he struck up a conversation with a fellow, and it turned out this fellow was a designer, he was on the board of directors of Fila in Italy and he discovered in the conversation that we wear white sneakers with our tuxedos, tails. So he got quite excited, he said, this is fantastic! He said, you know I have a board meeting ... this is a fantastic idea. Well, we never heard back from him. But maybe a year and a half later, we were walking along the Miracle Mile in Chicago, and we were going past a Fila store and a great big window. And we look in the window and sure enough, there’s this 6 foot 8 basketball star with a basketball under his arm, tails and white Fila shoes. He loved the idea!
DP: Well I look at the videos, and I look onstage and I say, wow, white shoes with no Nike swoosh is actually more of a compliment than with, because to me it means you haven’t had to resort to that. ... I’m still thinking about Mooredale House and Mooredale Concerts. I’ve got that somewhere in my mind because of when was chatting with MB [Daellenbach] to set up the interview here at your house I asked whether there’s an aspect of homecoming – you haven’t played [at Mooredale Concerts] before have you?
CD: No, we haven’t played there, but we’ve certainly spent a lot of time over at [Mooredale] House as our kids were growing up, particularly the swimming programs with the proximity and the fact that you know that they’re going to get proper swimming instruction and so forth. And we have a swimming pool so it was very much on our mind, that we wanted to make sure they knew all the rules and regs, and what ifs, and be carefuls and so forth. So, we spent a lot of time over at Mooredale, and then from time to time there would be art programs and various classes that we could sign up to, and MB herself in fact took yoga lessons over there for a couple of years, they were using that as a yoga studio. So we’ve had not only a close relationship but I think we must pass it several times a day!
DP: And the music programs? Mooredale Concerts? Did either of the kids dabble with the youth orchestra?
CD: Our oldest son came so close. He was studying violin and it just would have been the perfect time, and he decided he would rather sing and play piano. Just at that moment.
DP: Toronto Children’s Chorus?
CD: He was in the Children’s Chorus for a time, yeah.
DP: Interesting, because Mooredale Concerts has always also had this kind of maybe more explicit educational mandate and focus, and it’s an interesting meeting from my perspective to see the Brass coming into that context.
CD: A concert [presenter] really needs to be part of the community. The idea that artists could show up and suddenly an audience is going to show up and there’s a connection has been getting thinner and thinner as the years have gone by. And concert halls started realizing that they do have a role in society that’s a very important one and the Mooredale and Anton Kuerti and his wife [Kristine Bogyo] at the time really put together a program here that was, like I said before, like ear to the ground; they had a sense of what the community would appreciate; it’s become a very strong force. And it takes a long time. If you think usually a symphony’s been around for 100 years or something; to start a concert series from scratch, and to have it this successful, it’s fun to watch.
DP: Let’s talk about personnel. How long are you entitled to say it’s the same group? Because you’ve had by my count 20 players in the Brass, at this point. I’m not counting returns, if you count people who have gone and returned it’s probably closer to 27 or 28, because there are people who did more than one stint, but I think 20 different individuals.
CD: We don’t let anybody get away too far, we keep them on a very short leash. Like Ronnie Romm, our original trumpet player. We’re going to be at the University of Illinois doing a brass symposium and we invited Ronnie to join us. And Gene of course just lives down the road here, we’re in constant touch, and he’s very much part of the mentoring role as well, because we’re taking a concept and sharing that with these young players, putting them into this.
DP: Did [Gene] say, 40 years, it’s enough, or how did that go?
CD: Absolutely. He just figured that he’d been on the road enough. In fact we just had coffee yesterday and he was saying, you know I’m just getting over jetlag…
DP: What’s your touring schedule that you keep up these days? Because I mean when we talked a couple of days ago you were in Los Angeles.
CD: We’d just played Palm Desert. Well, we have a nice concert year. We’ve been very fortunate, even from the beginning we never had to do the rock and roll tours on a bus or that sort of thing. We’ve been very blessed with nice touring. And at this point it is kind of a worldwide reach. We do very little south of the equator, I think we’ve been in Brazil once, Venezuela, Australia once, but other than that it’s generally…we do a lot in Germany, a lot in Europe. This past season, the past year that’s just gone by we were in Asia twice and we were in Germany, we’re going back to Germany in September…we were in Korea just before Christmas and it was for a very short run, just a couple of concerts. Just out and back, like run-outs. Can you go to Owen Sound, ok, that’s fine; can you go to Seoul, yeah ok, that’s fine.
DP: You’d wait as long at the airport for one as for the other.
CD: So we have a nice touring schedule, I’d say we do about 60 or 70 concerts a year.
DP: And you still do a university/college circuit?
CD: We’re ensemble in residence at the University of Toronto here, so that means during the year we’ll be there 3 or 4 times during that year. And our horn player is actually at the University of Illinois and he has involved us there as well. So that’s becoming more present. And then it’s quite well-known amongst the presenters that Canadian Brass is a good target for workshops and clinics so invariably we’ll be in a town and we’ll have a workshop or two, to work with kids, and we actually encourage that. So that’s something we think is, more than anything, especially with the younger players, and talking about succession of players…It’s pretty interesting to show up at a college or university where the average age is 20-23, 19-23, something like that, and our trumpet player is 26. So they can identify from an age standpoint but then to hear this guy play, they think…it sort of suggests that maybe it is possible, if I did put that time and attention in, maybe I could do this. So it’s not so remote. Yet, our 26-year-old trumpet player is now the must-call Brandenburg specialist. He’s playing Brandenburg this summer in festivals out west, in the states, and the Israel Philharmonic has just retained him to come and do Brandenburg next season. So they’re hearing a 26-year-old but they’re hearing a really fine artist.
DP: Which of your two trumpet players…?
CD: That’s Caleb Hudson.
DP: My formula for when an ensemble has to stop calling itself by its [original] name is when the ages of the surviving founding members exceeds the combined age of the new members of the ensemble! So, until Gene retired in 2010, you were in trouble. Now you’re safe until you turn 100, if the others are all around 20.
CD: Well, both Gene and I, our mentor was Arnold Jacobs in the Chicago Symphony. And Bud Hersoff, the trumpet player, and Arnold Jacoson, they both played into their 80s, which was at the time unprecedented. So that kind of gave us courage. Between Prime Minister Trudeau marrying and having children when he was 50…I mean we’ve had this model behaviour to observe and it’s changed the world, almost.
DP: The third age, yeah. Interesting.
CD: But it is fascinating now, both Gene and I have mused about this a great deal…what we faced as young players was a totally different world. Now the young players are all growing up playing in our books. We have a set of books called Canadian Brass Book Of ... we have easy quintets, intermediate quintets, advanced quintets and we’ve passed the 500,000 mark several years ago, on these books out around the world. So kids are growing up playing our music, and our philosophy and our concept. So by the time we audition now someone to play in our group … when Caleb came to play for us, he was playing from memory. He knew our music backwards and forwards.
DP: Interesting. So there’s not a steep learning curve for some of these players.
CD: Our trombonist Achilles is from Greece, and he’s our resident historian. We had made a big collage, a giant poster of all of our recordings and we had it standing against the wall. When he came in, I said, Achilles you’ve got to take a look at this! And he stood there for about 4 or 5 minutes and said, 3 are missing. It’s amazing, he’ll often say things like, we’ll be talking, let’s say Toccata and Fugue, and he’d say, well, when you recorded that for the director disc in ’77 you played it quite a bit slower than in the ’91 version. He’s a total historian. When we had him come and play he thought he was in case we needed a substitute trombonist and Gene was at the audition, so he just thought he was making himself known as a potential sub. So he had a few pieces of music we’d sent him in advance, and we played through those and it went pretty quickly. We should have brought more music. Have you ever played Blackbird, the trombone solo? He said, well, I’ve never really played it, he said, I’ve heard it I could try. He played the whole thing from memory, he’d never performed it with an ensemble or anything and he just played it.
DP: World’s full of a lot of good players.
CD: Oh, totally different. I’m just glad these guys weren’t around when I was young!
DP: Yeah, well it’s interesting, I mean …. It’s hard to know what the future of it will be. It’s interesting in this town to see ensembles forming that are taking some brass away from the concert stage altogether. I think of a young jazzy ensemble called The Heavyweights, I don’t know if you know of them. They’re out on the streets, they’re out all over the place. And they’re taking the instruments out into a context where those instruments don’t need a concert stage, because they were public and outdoor instruments already.
CD: Our last German tour, an amazing thing happened. We showed up at the concert hall and there was a group of kids playing out front. We listened, it sounded a little familiar but didn’t pay too much attention. The next night, same group The next night – they were following our tour, and they’d be out in front as people were coming in. So finally we went out and met these guys, really nice kids. They’d come from the eastern provinces I think it wasn’t eastern Germany but it might have been … but they were showing up every night playing our music, and they were pretty darn good!
DP: So let’s talk a bit about the 1977 [China] tour. The ambassadors! First art music ensemble to get behind that “other” wall, the bamboo curtain … one [version of] the story is that Canada was too cheap to send a symphony orchestra and you were the ideal-sized combination of instruments; is that close?
CD: It’s close, not exactly right, but really close! The original cultural exchange that then-Prime Minister Trudeau had established was to send the Toronto Symphony over and in return they were going to have the Peking opera. And the Chinese got cold feet. They hadn’t had anybody there for 10 years and to bring an entire entourage, orchestra and everybody, you get into 120, 130 people. And a very clever attaché, the cultural attaché Brian Macdonald, who subsequently ran the Banff Centre, but anyway at that time he was there with the government contingent. He actually came up with this idea. He said, how about a trial run with a smaller group? This would be on very short notice, we were invited to be the first lobby of this cultural exchange and the rest proceeded as planned; but from the tour that we made, it was very successful. And from their point of view, no problem. There was no cultural problem whatsoever. So, game on, that established that. But you’re right, at the first breath it was like, well then, what do we do? Wow, here’s an idea. And off we went.
DP: So, one more big topic really, which is, getting to the whole issue of recorded music. You talked earlier about how being able to show up [in New York] with an LP was a real calling card, and in the early years, you’ve mentioned Boot and you also had 4 or 5 CBC records at the time. And then started a period when you were on the road and carrying your music and touring, when you hooked up with big labels. RCA?
CD: RCA was first. That WQXR radio show that I mentioned earlier to you, where we went in and played a live show? Iit was one of these moments … You know how often you hear people say, well I heard something, I was listening to whatever on the radio and I had to pull the car over and listen. Jay Sachs, senior producer at RCA, said that he was driving to work and we came on the air and he listened to our show and he went right in to his boss, Tom Sheppard, famous for being Leonard Bernstein’s producer, and said, we’ve got to listen to this group. And a meeting was established, and we went in to see Tom Sheppard. The meeting seemed kind of ..., he was asking us for our repertoire suggestions, well, what sort of things can you guys play? We were a little reticent to give him a whole A and R list of things until we were sure where he was going. So we told him a few things, and we had a nice handshake; leaving the room, we were about halfway out to the door and he says, you boys don’t play any music by Fats Waller do you? And Gene and I looked at each other and said, we love Fats Waller. Of course we didn’t have a piece at that time by Fats Waller but of course we loved Fats Waller. They had just recorded the Ain’t Misbehavin show, the cast recording, a really great thing. So we quickly came up with an “Ain’t Misbehavin” arrangement and they gave us a trial. We actually went into the RCA studios in New York and did a recording session, and they liked it a lot. We were a little short on music, and as things would happen that was one of the most fortuitous … Tom made one of those executive phone calls. Luther Henderson! Luther, would you be able to make 3 arrangements? so Luther did “Handful of Keys,” “Loungin’ at the Waldorf” and “Lookin’ Good But Feelin’ Bad”…. and it became a lifelong relationship, us and Luther. Luther ended up writing over 150 pieces for us. Luther’s a jazz icon, he’d been Duke Ellington’s right-hand man, rehearsal pianist. And Luther loved working with us because we were not jazz musicians. He said with Ellington he always had a problem, he’d bring a piece in totally written and Ellington would say, well, Luther, you’re not telling my boys what to play, are you? He just wanted the head, the front and the back. And Luther said that meant as a writer he couldn’t control things; all would depend on the night, that night. He said as a writer he loved working with us because it was his improvisation and he established it at his writing level; he said now players can play this for the next hundred years not being held to this “lower standard” of “just give me the head of the tune.”
DP: Which has its own different magic, but you’ve got to be there.
CD: Exactly. So Luther just loved this and of course for us, how could we ever not.
DP: So after RCA what was it? Sony?
CD: RCA, BMG. We were there on the RCA Red Seal label; their logo at the time was “where artists become legends”… So sure enough, the first thing that happened our first release, the Fats Waller, the Schwann Catalogue was a big deal back then. Pre-computer, every record store had a Schwann Catalogue and RCA owned the inside front cover. So our first release, inside front cover Schwann Catalogue, all over the world. It’s things like that, ... you just can’t quantify the impact of something like that.
DP: So you left RCA why?
CD: We found our upward mobility by changing labels, because everything we did was unprecedented. As far as RCA was concerned, the three years we were there, they were just amazed: you guys sell records it’s going so well! And we’re saying but, but, but, we need this, and we want to do that and they’d say, well, you know…so we moved to CBS. And they were getting very excited…we did Art of the Fugue and our Mozart collection in New York at the time which again was unprecedented, a brass group playing at Mostly Mozart; we had to create a lot of Mozart repertoire. So CBS gave us that opportunity. And then the next move had a lot of Toronto connection, a very successful entrepreneur in the music business, a fellow named Costa Pilavachi. Costa went to York University, his dad was a Greek diplomat, so Costa grew up here in Canada, became a manager. He became our manager here in Canada and then Costa went to the National Arts Centre, then he went to Boston and became Seiji Ozawa’s personal manager down there. Phillips Records from the Netherlands was recording in Boston. They met Costa and hired Costa, with no record background whatsoever. Just as we were about to re-sign with CBS, we were at the 11th hour, and our friend Costa ended up at Phillips, and Phillips brought us on the label. ... And that gave us a lot more presence in Europe, which was really valuable. But then we felt we were losing some space here in North America, so we went back to BMG.
DP: So Phillips was 1990-94?
CD: In that range.
DP: What I also noticed was around that time, that your own label, Opening Day seems to rear its head briefly, around ’93, ’94 …
CD: Well, it actually goes like this -- Opening Day is kind of fun ... Stuart Laughton?
DP: Uh huh. Trumpet. Youngest ever player in the Brass
CD: Stuart had a very major influence on the music scene here; he started the Opening Day label, nothing to do with The Brass whatsoever, in the early ‘90s it was an association of friends. The idea was that Stuart would make a recording and all of his friends would help promote that, and then Mary Lou Fallis would make a record and they would all help promote that … that kind of cooperative kind of venture. And he had been working with that for some 10 years when we brought him back into the group. He played with us in the 2000s, 2004 I believe, 2003,4,5. We were just starting our own label, and it was my idea to have a Canadian Brass recording company and Stuart was running Opening Day. He called it a hostile takeover! But we talked about it at great length and he didn’t feel like that was his destiny to be actually managing and running a label, that was never his intention. So he was quite happy to have someone come in, me in particular, who kind of enjoys that aspect of it as well. So it became a perfect logical home for us and with this amazing program we have here in Canada … It’s funny, you go to the States and they’re worrying about health care and we have fantastic health care. And they’re down there trying to figure out how to make recordings and we have Factor. It’s amazing the kind of support that is around here for Canadian art. And we were able to take advantage of that, and really give the Opening Day a shot in the arm, with the headliner being the Canadian Brass, because we were a known quantity, we could sell recordings. So, game on, that’s where it really took off for us. It became the umbrella then for us, and from our point of view what we also brought to Opening Day was a broader reach, because my brother-in-law is in the pop world ... So we actually had some fingers into the real industry, which is kind of important -- to keep track of what’s going on to stay afloat. I called it coat-tailling, which was basically take a pop artist and work together. For example, with a young singer we did a Christmas song, Very Merry Christmas, which actually is a standard now in AC radio, so we’re talking now 8 years ago. And I remember the cutline for this was, “You won’t hear Canadian Brass anytime soon on AC Radio, but at Christmas...” That was exactly what we thought we could take advantage of. [With radio stations] its usually “if it’s not hip hop, if it’s not rock, if it’s not pop.” But at Christmas, ... We thought we could take advantage of that. And being kind of in charge of our own destiny as a recording label, we were able to experiment, try different things like that.
DP: So just as your LP was your calling card, the CD became the calling card ... I remember Anton Kwiatkowski [recording engineer] telling me a while back that after a time unless you were in the little group of superstars the labels were supporting, you could do more to sell your own products on the road, if you have a decent concert tour, and decent product, than any label would do for you. I guess my question is where that fits with how things have been over time for the Canadian Brass.
CD: Well, the majors said there were five [classical] artists that were always in the bins. We always sold neck and neck with Jim Galway, Yo Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, King Singers, Canadian Brass. I remember someone writing from Milwaukee saying “we found 17 titles of Canadian Brass at our local Barnes and Noble.” We always felt that as long as you could get your recording on the truck we were going to be in the stores. Well, then the trucks stopped leaving. That just isn’t happening anymore, for anybody. So that’s when taking charge of our own recording destiny became very important. And fortunately we had very good training; some artists just do their artistic thing but, as we do naturally, we would think, hmm, so producer does this and that well, and the engineer does that well, so maybe we could do this ourselves, but that’s something we shouldn’t do ourselves. Our challenge with Opening Day was to create an album. And the first one out of the shoot was called Amazing Brass. We knew that we had to have a recording that people could listen and compare with a Phillips or an RCA or a CBS and say, the quality’s there. I mean, how dangerous that would be ...
DP: Not to maintain the quality.
CD: Exactly. Well, just by luck, my college roommate, we went our separate ways after college, he worked for the NR studios in New York. I called Dixon Van Winkel, I said Dixon, it’s time for us to get back together in a working relationship. We’ve been friends all these years, now let’s get back to work. So we have Dickson working with us and MB, my wife, produces, and has very, very fine ears. she keeps hearing things ... I guess it’s really important to have people at your elbow who can say, you know, that wasn’t quite right, let’s do that again. It’s really really important ... You know singers have coaches their entire careers. Pavorotti until the last day he sang he always had coaches. Brass players, woodwind players, orchestra people, they take their last lesson 30 years ago, and it’s “don’t tell me what to do!” What a strange perception. I don’t want to be the last to find out, I want to be first.
DP: Well, we’ve covered a lot of ground! This is great. We’ll have to pick through to pull out some of the salient points.
CD: Start the book.
DP: Indeed, start the book, as they say. Thanks a lot, this is great.
CD: Well, thanks for coming and doing this.