Donnie Palmer comes to Toronto

[Nate Dorward]

I'm terribly saddened to hear of Donnie's dental injury; but it's nice to know he's in town. I'd always thought that his career was seriously hampered by his long stint in Halifax--a great town to live in, but not a lot of good local players to work with. He's a unique player--the Konitz influence is audible, yes, but he has a drollness all his own & a strange air-filled tone. Not sure if I can make the Saturday gig but I'll try. -- all best --N



Don Palmer tumbles into T.O.

When the veteran alto-saxophonist lost his two front teeth in an accident, he knew it was time to change his life drastically

By MARK MILLER

Thursday, April 14, 2005 Updated at 8:30 AM EST
From Thursday's Globe and Mail

Don Palmer arrived in Toronto from Halifax last October in much the same manner that he went to New York from Halifax in 1959. He just slipped into town without fanfare.

Back then, the 20-year-old alto saxophonist from Cape Breton had just left the Royal Canadian Artillery Band in Halifax and was keen to study improvisation with fellow altoist Lee Konitz, one of the seminal modernists on the New York scene.

Now, just turned 66, Palmer can review the career that followed -- 16 years as a successful freelance musician in New York, another 26 as a popular teacher at Dalhousie University in Halifax -- and still find himself effectively starting over again in Toronto.

Twice over, actually.

He has been musing about such a move for at least 20 years, but it wasn't until he took a tumble 18 months ago on Lady Hammond Road in Halifax and broke his two front teeth that he found the resolve to follow through.

"That's what got me up here," he explains, over coffee in a west-end Toronto bakery, just around the corner from his new digs. "I realized how fragile life in general is, how transitory. If I want to do any playing, I'd better do it now."

But first things first. "I'm still learning how to play again," Palmer notes, citing the adjustments required by the dental repairs he has undergone since the accident. ("It was terrifying, man," he says of the fall, which must be one of a reed player's worst nightmares. "It took me a week to think about anything but shooting myself.")

So it is that Palmer has been laying low since his move from the coast five months ago -- practising mostly, teaching occasionally at Humber College in place of one of his former pupils, Kirk MacDonald, and sitting in at The Pilot, a Toronto tavern and jazz spot, with another of his old charges, Mike Murley.

Even at the best of times, he's not by nature the hustling type; affably soft-spoken and almost immodestly modest, he has only now begun to stir, lining up a matinee of his own at The Pilot for this Saturday.

"I'm not sure I have the confidence to walk in someplace and say, 'I'm here,' " he admits, explaining away the absence of any strategy to make his presence known in a new city. If that sounds like typically Canadian self-effacement, Palmer agrees without apology. "I wouldn't change it; I've known guys who are really aggressive about their careers and I always thought it cost them something in the way they approached their music."

Yes, he certainly would have known a lot of guys in New York who were aggressive about their careers. And yet he, too, thrived there in his own way, developing a reputation as -- in a friend's dryly affectionate description -- "the best third-alto player in town." He worked with swing orchestras, jazz bands, rock acts and Latin ensembles; he played for recording sessions and Broadway shows. You name it, he did it, albeit often anonymously.

"What saved my ass in New York was how well I could read [music]," he recalls. "You and I would audition, and we both know you're twice, maybe three times, as good a saxophonist as I am, but I got the job. I could read anything."

His training as a military bandsman served him especially well in that respect.

"In the army band we had played Hindemith's Symphony for Wind Ensemble; every bar was in a different time signature. I was 18 years old and I had all day to learn how to play it."

But Palmer didn't last for three years with Tito Puente's famous Latin-jazz orchestra -- an unlikely place for a redheaded Cape Bretoner, surely -- just because he could read music on sight.

Under the guidance of Lee Konitz, and in turn of Konitz's mentor, the legendary pianist Lennie Tristano, Palmer had also developed an incisive, even biting style as a soloist in the bop tradition.

Indeed, his jazz skills brought him frequent calls in the early 1970s to play with the celebrated Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra on Monday nights at the Village Vanguard; his introduction to the band reveals the tangled web he had woven through the New York music scene by then.

As he tells it, he was waiting one Saturday afternoon at Madison Square Garden for a sound check with The Four Tops when he noticed an alto saxophonist with another act pacing nervously backstage and glancing at his watch in anticipation of a looming engagement elsewhere.

Palmer generously offered to fill in for the run-through.

"Sunday night, the phone rings," he remembers, picking up the story, "and it's that saxophonist -- it was Jerry Dodgion -- and he's asking if I'd like to play with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis band. When I got to the gig, he was sitting in the lead-alto chair. What happened, I guess, is that he had asked someone if I could play."

Palmer pauses before adding, "He must have asked a friend of mine. . . ."

Palmer peppers his account of those New York years with similar disclaimers, not least the fact that, toward the end of his time in the city, he lived at 8th Avenue and 53rd Street and thus was available to Broadway's theatres and studios on virtually no notice.

"I got a lot of my work because people found out that there was this alto player who owned a tenor and a baritone, who could read, and who was able to get there in 10 minutes."

However he came by it, Palmer brought a wealth of experience back to Canada when he returned in 1975 to Sydney, N.S., out of concern for the well-being of his parents. Three years later, he was appointed director of jazz studies at Dalhousie University and quickly moved to the centre of the Halifax jazz scene, as active off campus as on.

He was a founder of the Atlantic Jazz Festival in 1987, worked with bassist Skip Beckwith and drummer Jerry Granelli in the trio Alive and Well around the turn of the 1990s, and has been central to fellow Haligonian Paul Cram's various creative schemes, including the Benghazi Saxophone Quartet, Upstream and the Paul Cram Orchestra.

More broadly, he has seen several of his former students enjoy success in other Canadian centres, although he observes, of his role as a teacher, "The nice thing is that if you do it right, none of them sound like you."

The best-known of his erstwhile protégés are cases in point -- Kirk MacDonald, Mike Murley and Montreal-based Joel Miller, all tenor saxophonists who sound not the least like each other, much less like their old teacher.

That, of course, leaves Palmer with an elusive sort of legacy to date, one filled out on record by just a 1970 LP with Tito Puente, two CDs with Alive and Well, and three alongside Paul Cram. In truth, Palmer still has his own mark to make. Hence his move to Toronto.

But that fall on Lady Hammond Road in 2003 has apparently taken its toll on his playing. He's no longer quite the Don Palmer of old. Or so he says. Perhaps he's being modest yet again, tempering everyone's expectations, including his own. Or perhaps he's just being realistic.

"I'm not going to try to be whatever I thought I was," he suggests, putting his past behind him in favour of an uncertain future. "This is who I am now, and this is what I'm going forward with."

[Dan G]

It really is a shame that Palmer, probably because he's spent most of his career in Canada, isn't better know. The first Alive and Well disc really is very good, not sure if they ever made a second one. It seems only Granelli from that band went on to be better known (and he isn't really a household name either).

[Nate Dorward]

Yes there's two Alive & Well discs. I was present at the concert where the 1st was recorded, & used to play tracks from it on my radio show in Halifax but I haven't heard it for years; never heard the 2nd one.

Granelli....... eeehh, I dunno. I think he probably was a good drummer at one point but egotism & pretentiousness seem to have got the better of him. I find it painful to see him in concert as I've rarely seen a musician more visibly in love with everything he plays. (Admittedly, I've never seen Keith Jarrett live.)

[Dan G]

I can tolerate the Granelli acoustic albums that I've heard (a couple of them on Songlines) but he's done some electric projects that I thought sucked really bad.

The most dreadful thing I've ever sat through was a mid-90s Jane Ira Bloom gig with her (trying) to use electronics to supplement her horn, Granelli playing an amplified drum kit and drum machine, both doing things that might have been interesting 25 years prior. Granelli seemed to be putting on more of a show than playing music - i.e. look at how cool it is that I have something electronic here and I can get off my stool and fiddle with some knobs...) The trio was rounded out by Mark Dresser, who just fumbled along, probably wondering how he got himself into such a situation. I've seen Dresser maybe 15 times, in a lot of contexts, and this was the only one that was less than great*. I stayed for the whole thing for some reason, but my wife (who seldom goes anywhere without reading material, most often work-related) left about 1/4 way into it and sat in the lobby and read.

* a couple of years later during a solo show, he broke a string and decided to restring his bass on stage while telling stories. it was a billion times better than the Bloom gig.