Book Excerpt: The Black Atlantic Reconsidered

In honour of Black History month, here is an excerpt from Winfried Siemerling’s book The Black Atlantic Reconsidered. In this excerpt we get a glimpse at how black Canadian musicians influenced Montreal culture and history in the mid-twentieth century.

The following excerpt is taken from chapter 5 – Other Black Canadas

THE BLACKENING OF QUEBEC:
JAZZ, DIASPORA, AND THE HISTORY AND WRITING OF BLACK ANGLOPHONE MONTREAL

On 30 June 2009, Montreal jazz pianist Oliver Jones and singer Ranee Lee opened the thirtieth Montreal Jazz Festival in its new venue, L’Astral. After a premature retirement, Jones was returning to a festival that his presence had graced from its second year in 1981. His importance as a citizen of Montreal and a member of its black community, however, easily exceeds such widely advertised events. In April 2007, Jones headlined a benefit concert that was attended by Daisy Peterson, his former piano teacher. Due to illness, her brother Oscar – that other Montreal jazz legend – was represented by a large photograph on stage. The concert was a fundraiser to help reopen the former Negro Community Centre (ncc), founded in 1927, whose mission had been to “alleviate social and economic conditions among Blacks in Montreal” (ncc). Oliver Jones had spent much of his time there as a child. Now he was back for a benefit that served as a vivid reminder of the strong, ongoing presence of one of Montreal’s oldest black communities. The beginnings of this black anglophone community date back to the late nineteenth century. It was preceded by earlier blacks in Montreal such as the “oldtimers” of the Underground Railroad and, as we have already seen, the black slaves of Montreal.

The evening’s celebration of black musical traditions, institutions, and community history evoked Montreal and Quebec cultural geographies that are rarely present in a wider public imaginary.
(…)
[Oscar Peterson] remained an icon of black Montreal’s culture and community, which he credited with his success; at one point in his autobiography, A Jazz Odyssey (2002), he emphasizes the formative roles that the UNIA and Marcus Garvey’s visit to Montreal played in his career. This endorsement of a black cultural leader mostly associated with black nationalism might be surprising, but it hardly minimized Peterson’s integrationist stance, illuminated strikingly by the dedication of one of his best-known compositions, “Hymn to Freedom,” to Martin Luther King, Jr.

In Sarsfield’s No Crystal Stair, an early Oscar Peterson concert with the Johnny Holmes Orchestra – probably in the fall of 1942 – gives rise to a heated post-concert discussion among a racially mixed group of participants (135–9, 141–2). The debate mostly concerns influences on Peterson’s style and pitches his right-hand arpeggio technique against his left-hand bass work.
(…)
In Sarsfield’s portrait of black Montreal culture of the 1940s, jazz is only one element – albeit a highly visible one. It constitutes a specific and remarkable contribution (among many) to Montreal history and culture. The debate about different cultural specificities and their dialogues takes on a wider meaning in that context. Evoking black jazz as a community-specific and culturally rooted yet cross-culturally receptive and influential matrix, Sarsfield’s novel is relevant for its reimagining the multiple emotional and imaginary geographies that constitute Montreal’s history. This is underscored by the historical depth of the community it portrays. Jazz is a visible and audible sign of that community, whose rooted history is intertwined with the founding of modern Montreal in the nineteenth century and its earlier black history, which the novel cites back to Angélique and slavery in Montreal (86).

Learn more about The Black Atlantic Reconsidered