Brian Wilson, Joe Jackson and Kool & the Gang among the music legends at this year’s jazz festival

The Montreal International Jazz Festival is not just for jazz lovers; that was the main lesson I learned when I attended my first show nearly 30 years ago, and was especially so when I started covering the festival for my Montreal Times column back in 2008.

For over the past eight festivals, I have had the privilege to catch so many music legends – especially rock music legends – as they graced the jazz festival stage. That impressive list included Oliver Jones, Dave Brubeck, George Benson, Lyle Lovett, Ginger Baker (the drummer from the 60s British rock trio Cream), Paul Simon, Elvis Costello, Stevie Wonder, the Steve Miller Band, and Huey Lewis & the News.

For this year’s 37^th edition of the Montreal International Jazz Festival, which runs from June 29 to July 9, organizers at a press conference last week unveiled their massive line-up of 175 indoor shows that are divided up into 15 distinctive series. And like in past festivals, it includes its share of music legends who have racked up their share of gold records, Top 40 hit songs and Grammy Awards, and will certainly attract those baby boomers who grew up listening to their music when they originally aired on the radio or appeared at their local record store.

Here are some of the music legends that are scheduled to perform this summer:

-Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson will commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the group’s landmark album “Pet Sounds”, as he will perform songs from the album, accompanied by Blondie Chaplin and former Beach Boys bandmate Al Jardine as part of the Evenements Speciaux TD Series at Salle Wilfrid Pelletier of Place des Arts (July 7).

-It will be a rocking celebration at Salle Wilfrid Pelletier, as legendary 70s and 80s funk band Kool & the Gang offers a night of their frenzied hits for their many fans (July 4).

-As part of the Grands Concerts Rio Tinto Series at Theatre Maisonneuve of Place des Arts, eclectic rocker Joe Jackson (“Steppin’ Out”, “I’m the Man”) will play his unique brand of rock music that has attracted a cult following for more than 35 years (July 4).

-A night filled with the roots of hip-hop music is in store at Club Soda, as pioneer rappers The Sugarhill Gang (who had a hit in 1980 with their original rap song “Rapper’s Delight”) headlines a show that promises to be an old school rapper’s delight bash (July 2).

-And for those who enjoy listening to big band music, the 8^th edition of the Battle of the Bands will be a guaranteed musical time warp into the 1940s swing era at the Maison Symphonique de Montreal, as previous participant the Glenn Miller Orchestra faces off against newcomers the Cab Calloway Band … complete with “Minnie the Moocher” (July 9).

Tickets for these and the remaining 170 jazz festival indoor shows are now on sale. For more information, or to purchase tickets, go to www.montrealjazzfest.com.

(This article originally appeared in the April 30, 2016 edition of the Montreal Times)

"Last Night at the Gayety" an entertaining snapshot of Montreal's bygone Open City era

Between 1939 and 1960, Montreal enjoyed a period when it operated as an "open city".

It was a time when vice such as prostitution and illegal gambling houses called "Blind Pigs", and graft amongst the Montreal Police Department and city hall, ran rampant. Popular nightclubs like the El Morocco, the Esquire Showbar and the Normandie Roof hosted some of the biggest American entertainers at that time. And Montrealers could read all about the swinging nightlife in their hometown via the screaming bold headlines on the front pages of the Montreal Gazette, the Montreal Daily Star and the Montreal Herald (where they could get the latest nightlife dope in Al Palmer's widely-read "Man About Town" column).

In fact, Montreal was the original "Sin City" before Las Vegas inherited the title and has kept it to this day.

But the cornerstone of Montreal's naughty open city nightlife was the Gayety Theatre on the corner of St. Urbain and St. Catherine streets, where American-born stripper Lili St. Cyr made it her home base, as her risque burlesque-style shows throughout most of the 1940s caused a sensation -- and a scandal -- with her Montreal fans and detractors.

However, by the beginning of the 1950s, a big change was to overcome the adult playground that was downtown Montreal. Pacifique ("Pax") Plante, a crusading member of the Montreal Police Department, first as head of the vice squad and then as chief of police, decided to undertake a major clean-up of the city; and his main target was Lili St. Cyr and her titillating shows that constantly filled the Gayety Theatre whenever she was in town.

And now, more than 60 years later, George Bowser and Rick Blue, Montreal's satirical troubadours par excellence, pays tribute to the wild side of Montreal's open city era in their musical romp "Last Night at the Gayety", which caps off the Centaur Theatre's 2015-2016 season from now until May 15.

The show takes place in 1951, when Plante begins his anti-vice clean up campaign in earnest, first as a series of expository articles in the newspaper Le Devoir (which also became a sensational best selling book), and then through a series of raids throughout the city's many bordellos, gambling houses and nightclubs. And with the help of the powerful Catholic Church -- in the form of the equally crusading Father d'Anjou -- Plante aims his vice cleansing sights on the Gayety Theatre in general, and Lili St. Cyr's moral corrupting burlesque shows in particular.

The show magically recaptures the glitz and bright lights of Montreal's adult playground era of 70 years ago, from the boudoir style of Ms. St. Cyr's dressing room, to those colourful neon signs that loudly pronounced the boisterous clubs that dotted the downtown landscape, to those eye brow-raising spectacles that filled the Gayety ... silk stockings, bubble-filled bathtub and all. And Bowser & Blue's signature satirical sound is prevalent throughout the songs that make up the show's musical score, and entertainingly sets up the story of Montreal's vice-ridden history, from the grittiness of Griffintown, to how Plante has to grow a large pair of balls to be Montreal's top cop, to how the city thrived on the trio of casinos, bordellos and booze.

And the ensemble cast works so well together to make this piece of Montreal history come alive, especially Daniel Brochu as Pax Plante (who bears quite the resemblance to the real-life anti-vice crusader); Michel Perron as Father d'Anjou (who convincingly exhibits the power behind the cassock in Quebec during those pre-Quiet Revolution years); Holly Gauthier-Frankel as Molly, the wide-eyed young girl who wants to escape her humdrum life in Griffintown for the tantalizing excitement of the Gayety stage; Davide Chiazze as Jimmy, the Montreal mobster who has his own drum rimshot every time he delivers his vaudeville-style one-liners; and special kudos goes to Julia Juhas' performance as Lili St. Cyr, who recaptures the scandalous spirit of this legendary stripper with every bump and grind she performs onstage (and here's a piece of dramatic coincidence: the entire cast of the show are from Montreal with one exception ... Julia Juhas -- who is from Toronto -- which sort of parallels that of Lili St. Cyr, the Montreal sensation who was actually born in the United States).

"Last Night at the Gayety" is an entertaining snapshot of a Montreal that is no more, but in all of its red light glory. It's a fun way to discover a chapter of Montreal history that many of today's generation of Montrealers are seldom familiar with, and is a rousing time capsule-type of salute to a Montreal that went from a sin city during the 40s and 50s to an international city thanks to Expo '67 and the 1976 Summer Olympics.

A conversation with Toni Tennille: Her music, career … and life with the Captain

For any individual, they always have that defining moment that will determine how their life or career will be shaped. For singer Toni Tennille, that moment came when she was six years old in her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, when a freak accident that involved a wheelbarrow severely crushed her finger.

“Believe it or not, that injury was one of the most important things that happened in my life. I kept on hiding my damaged finger, and tried to keep people from looking at it,” said Tennille during a recent phone interview. “I went through a lot of surgeries on that finger, but there are limits to what a plastic surgeon in New Orleans could do back in 1946. And no matter how my finger healed, my parents made sure that I had the opportunity to learn how to play the piano and play it well.”

Her abilities and skills as a piano player (and later keyboards), regardless of the damage that her finger sustained from that injury, gave Tennille a career in music as one half of the Grammy Award-winning duo The Captain and Tennille, in which they had a string of top 10 hits during the mid and late 70s such as “Muskrat Love”, “The Way I Want To Touch You”, “Do That To Me One More Time” and their first – and best-known -- hit song “Love Will Keep Us Together”.

Tennille chronicles her life and career in her recently published book Toni Tennille: A Memoir (Taylor Trade Publishing). A great deal of the book focuses on her 40-year marriage to Daryl Dragon (aka “The Captain”), and the fact that although onstage they appeared to be a happy couple that exemplified the bubbly, upbeat love songs that gained them tremendous success, it was a totally different story behind the music.

“I have spent most of the book trying to explain my relationship with Daryl. I was always a romantic type of girl who was looking for her soul mate, and I thought I found it with Daryl. In fact, Daryl was a little bit of a mystery to me, but that was the way he was,” she said. “There was always a lot of love in my family when I grew up, and I knew my family loved me. And I always tried to draw Daryl in and teach him what love was all about, but I wasn’t able to get through to him, and it was quite frustrating.”

Tennille believes that Daryl’s difficult upbringing was a key factor to his eventual eccentric, detached nature, in which many of the Captain and Tennille’s fans felt it made him an attractive, yet rather enigmatic, personality. “Daryl’s mother suffered from mental illness. And although she loved him so much, she never gave him the love and understanding that he needed. And his father, who was a brilliant composer and musical arranger, was jealous of Daryl’s success; in fact, during the height of our popularity, he used to joke that he was ‘the Admiral’, and that was quite hard for Daryl to accept,” she said.

However, aside from then tensions and the personal and psychological battle that the couple endured, Tennille admitted that professionally speaking, the duo worked their magic when it came to producing their music, which she credited to Daryl’s perfectionism and attention to detail (which earned him the title “the captain of the keyboards” when he was touring with the Beach Boys during the early 70s).

“The music was great. The lyrics for our songs expressed how I felt about Daryl and how much I loved him. And although Daryl never paid attention to the lyrics, he was great at making the music, in which he fulfilled the part of writing the songs and bringing them to life, especially the musical arrangements,” she said.

As well, like any showbiz memoir, Tennille’s book has its share of interesting anecdotes, especially during a 1976 performance in the East Room of the White House in the presence of President Gerald Ford and First Lady Betty Ford, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip … and a rather displeased Henry Kissinger (especially when they performed “Muskrat Love”).

“Basically, Kissinger didn’t like what he heard; in fact, he sat directly opposite me during our performance and hated what we were playing. But President and Mrs. Ford, and the Queen and Prince Phillip loved it,” she said. “It was an infamous episode during that stage of our careers, but we got a big kick out of it. We always had a lot of fun doing ‘Muskrat Love’ after that, and we always dedicated it to Dr. Kissinger.”

Although she and Daryl divorced two years ago, Tennille found ways to heal her wounds from this difficult marriage, whether it be her fascination with dogs, having her own TV talk show in the early 80s, performing in a touring production of “Victor Victoria”, doing concert tours where she performed a great American songbook-type repertoire, and even writing her book (which she credits her niece Caroline for the motivation and help in spending the two years it took to tell her story on paper).

However, Tennille is looking for some new career paths, and might have found it, thanks mainly to her recording of the audio version of the book. “I am 75 years old, and all of a sudden, you’re old; it happens so fast. I never wanted to be out there singing when I am not at my best. I don’t want to be compared to the way I was during my prime,” she said. “I loved recording the audio version of my book, because people get some sense of the nuances of my story when they hear me narrating it and it adds some dimension to it. I would love to do more audio book recordings for other authors’ works; at least they would be books that I wouldn’t be emotionally invested in.”

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Stuart Nulman’s “Book Banter” segment is a twice-a-month feature on “The Stuph File Program” with Peter Anthony Holder, which now has almost 150,000 listeners per week.  You can either listen or download it at www.peteranthonyholder.com, Stitcher.com or subscribe to it on iTunes.  Plus you can find it at www.CyberStationUSA.com, www.KDXradio.com, True Talk Radio, streaming on www.PCJMedia.com, and over the air at World FM 88.2fm in New Zealand, Media Corp in Singapore and WSTJ, St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Stuart can be reached at bookbanter@hotmail.com.

Razzle Dazzle by Michael Riedel (Simon & Schuster, $34.99)

There are three main cornerstones in the American entertainment world: Hollywood, Nashville (aka “Music City”), and New York City, especially the Broadway theatre district.

However, over the past 50 years, the Broadway of Irving Berlin, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Mary Martin and Ethel Merman, had seen its share of triumphs, setbacks and tragedies. And when there were times that it looked like Broadway would collapse into obscurity, shows like “A Chorus Line”, “Cats”, “Phantom of the Opera” and “The Lion King” would come around and snatch it from the jaws of that eminent collapse.

And during those 50 years, the struggles to keep Broadway alive and relevant – especially when it was butting heads with the City of New York and its municipal administration – would sometimes provide more drama than what was being offered onstage in many of its historical theatres along the Great White Way.

New York Post theatre columnist Michael Riedel has been a keen observer of the Broadway theatre scene for over 20 years, and he brings his passion for the American theatre and its famous home on Broadway – not to mention its countless demises and rebirths – in an immensely readable backstage account called Razzle Dazzle.

The central characters that make up the narrative in Razzle Dazzle are Bernard Jacobs and Gerald Schoenfeld, two New York lawyers who were hired during the 1950s to represent the Shubert Organization, which was run by the aging J.J. Shubert, who founded with his brothers Sam and Lee in 1900 a company that would produce Broadway shows and own and operate Broadway theatres, which by the 1920s became a virtual entertainment empire on the American theatre scene.

And when J.J. died in 1963, both Jacobs and Schoenfeld took over the Shubert Organization (and its subsequent Shubert Foundation), and quickly became the most powerful men on Broadway. And from the moment they assumed control, they were greeted with their first scandal: a full-fledged investigation by the New York State Attorney General into a controversial financial practice regarding show ticket sales, in which ticket brokers and other high ranking individuals sold tickets to popular Broadway shows of the time at outrageously inflated prices, in which they would pocket the difference (which was known as “ice”).

And the turbulent directorship of Messrs. Schoenfeld and Jacobs didn’t end there.  There were other events that coloured this new era, such as good old boy Irving Goldman, who managed to finagle a $1 million contract for his paint company (and was later appointed as New York’s cultural commissioner); the pitched battle to save three legendary Broadway theatres – the Helen Hayes, the Morosco and the Bijou – from demolition (the Marquis Theatre now stands on the site of these three theatres); how Broadway handled the growing AIDS crisis of the 1980s; the bitter rivalry between “Dreamgirls” and “Nine” to see who would win the most Tony Awards in 1982; the fearful, powerful influence of New York Times drama critic Frank Rich to make or break a new show; the ratio of a half-dozen or so flops for every Broadway hit show; the rivalry between the Shuberts and the Nederlander organization to get the best shows to fill their theatres; the Shubert Organization’s lengthy battle to transform Times Square from a centre of sleaze to a glitzy tourist attraction; how producer David Merrick turned the untimely death of director Gower Champion into a front page media event and helped make the musical “42^nd Street” a major hit; how the influence of several British writers, producers and directors (i.e. Andrew Lloyd Webber) and the Disney Company turned Broadway into what it is today; not to mention all the power plays, bruised egos, hurt feelings and vindictive reactions that went along with it.

And look at the end result of all the above – and more – that are reported in the book and how it affected the Broadway theatrical world today: by the end of the 2000s, an average of 12 million people saw a Broadway show every year, with an annual box office gross of over $1 billion, and Broadway theatres and its offshoots contribute to 11 percent of the entire economic output of New York City.

What I enjoyed about Razzle Dazzle is Riedel’s penchant for giving the story behind the story, and whatever happened to New York City – good or bad – mirrored the well being of Broadway. This was well represented with the story of New York City’s near financial collapse in 1974-75 (in which then-President Gerald Ford flatly refused any financial assistance to the city), and as a result of the financial downturn and Times Square and the surrounding area getting increasingly seedy and dangerous, many Broadway theatres remained empty and theatergoers were discouraged from walking the streets of New York after 6 p.m., which hurt overall theatre attendance. However, it took the creative mind of the late Michael Bennett to develop an out-of-the-box musical about a group of aspiring singers and dancers who were auditioning for coveted roles in a Broadway musical called “A Chorus Line” – and the faith of Bernie Jacobs – that helped improve the fortunes of both New York as a viable tourist attraction, and Broadway as a show business institution (and “A Chorus Line” became one of the most popular musicals ever, which ran on Broadway for 15 years).

Razzle Dazzle is probably one of the best books about Broadway’s illustrious, yet sometimes flawed, history since critic Brook Atkinson’s monumental history Broadway and William Goldman’s behind the scenes study of a typical year on Broadway called The Season (which were both published in 1970). It’s a penetrating look at how two unlikely people with a passion for the theatre fought tooth and nail over the past 50 years to keep the Broadway theatre scene to its legendary glory, and to make sure that the lights on the Great White Way were never dimmed.

(This piece originally appeared in the April 9, 2016 edition of the Montreal Times).