Jazz has been America’s cultural gift to the world for a little over 100 years. The improvisational art captured on record for a century is Victoria-based traditional jazz pianist Toni Blodgett’s inspiration and passion. She has travelled the world playing the music she loves, and this year she will be celebrated as one of a handful of Legends of Jazz at Victoria’s Hermann’s Jazz Club for her long tenure at the venerable venue.
Toni grew up on a wheat farm in tiny Elrose, Saskatchewan. It took her a long time to figure out what she wanted to do with her life, but the seeds for what is now over 50 years of playing piano in traditional jazz bands may have been planted while listening to the family radio and neighbours’ player pianos.
“As a girl I completed Grade 10 level with the Toronto Conservatory of Music and heard Louis Armstrong singing and playing New Orleans jazz on our radio,” Toni remembers. “Years later, the first time I visited New Orleans, it was like I’d been there before in another life. I just wept with joy!”
When Toni left Saskatchewan, she only knew that she “didn’t want to get married and stuck there with some farmer.”
She earned a teaching degree at the University of Saskatchewan and taught high school before moving to San Francisco in 1960, where she lived and worked until 1969, eventually marrying an American.
“On holiday in 1972, we visited my extended family in Parksville, and my then-husband saw Victoria and wanted to move here. He had three kids from a previous marriage back in California and, in 1977, when our marriage ended, he went back to California, leaving me in Victoria. I tried going back to Saskatchewan and taught music to Grades 3-8 in Regina for a year, then quit and went to Europe before returning to Victoria.”
“I’d started studying piano again before my marriage broke up,” she says. “It had been 16 years since I worked at the piano, but I needed to get back to something that I really loved. I certainly struggled getting my technique back, but I loved playing again.”
In Victoria, Toni heard a guy playing piano onstage at Cherry Bank Rib House and thought, “I could do that.” She got work there and soon heard Greg Sumner playing banjo and singing Jelly Roll Morton jazz tunes at Bartholomew’s Pub down the street from her gig at the Cherry Bank.
“I told Greg whatever you’re doing, I want to do it.”
Sumner put a group together called The Ragtime Rascals that played four nights a week at the Sidney Hotel for a couple of years. Then Toni co-lead The Ragtimers, a quartet that entertained aboard the Princess Marguerite on the Victoria-Seattle steamships daily sailing during the 1982-1983 tourist season.
Toni played solo gigs in the Tack Room at La Posada Hotel in Laredo, Texas and on the cruise ship Queen of the North for a month at Vancouver’s Expo ’86, and a stint with John Noris’ New Orleans Jazz Band at the Hyatt Regency’s Trapper Lounge in Waikiki. She played 10 years in the Dining Room at Butchart Gardens and a regular stint with Al Pease at Chantecler Restaurant. She played for years at Spinnakers Pub, too.
“I worked quite a few years at Spinnakers playing piano there in the bar area as you walk in,” Toni recalls. “One night, a man walked up to me and handed me a list of four tunes to see if I would play those for him. I said, ‘No problem’ and did just that. So later, he came back to me to say ‘I have travelled the world over. I have asked every piano player to play those for me, and you are the first one to ever be able to play all four of them.’”
“I do not remember what they were, but I do think I’ve had a little tape recorder playing in my brain since childhood,” Toni continues. “Only recently have I had to admit that I can no longer count on my memory… Aging is not a fun sport!”
“But I did have a storehouse of tunes that I could pretty much play in any key,” Toni adds. “So, one thing that my boyfriend Nic’s Bluetooth Soundbar playing YouTube is doing for me is reinforcing those melodies in my brain again.”
In the early 1980s Toni heard Victoria’s Dixieland Express and sat in with the band at Hermann’s Jazz Club.
“It was pretty rough at first,” she says. “The guys in the band had a real traditional sound with tuba and banjo. They didn’t have a piano player, and they didn’t want one. But eventually, I worked my way in. There were no microphones and no monitors. I just thrashed away. There were many great challenges and experiences during my 10 years with Dixieland Express. It was lots and lots of fun.”
In 1991, Toni had a dream where she went to get a job at the railroad and was offered a broom.
“I woke up thinking, ‘no, I want to drive the train.’” A student of Jungian philosophy, she took the dream seriously and started her own band. Called CanUS Jazz Band to celebrate the dual citizenship of its Canadian and American members, CanUS was an instant hit on the international traditional jazz festival circuit.
CanUS featured three-part vocal harmonies inspired by the Boswell Sisters, a legendary New Orleans group from the 1930s. Connie Boswell was one of jazz great Ella Fitzgerald’s biggest influences, and Toni shared a Great Ladies of Jazz Award with Connie Boswell at the 2000 Sun Valley Idaho Jazz Jamboree.
Toni and CanUS were also favourites of US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who arranged a concert at Washington DC’s prestigious Kennedy Center in 2002 with the aid of Department or Foreign Affairs pitching in with airfares for the band. Justice O’Connor wrote Toni a thank you letter stating, “The Kennedy Center concert was just wonderful. Your audience loved it, and no one more than me. Hearty thanks to you and every member of your talented group.”
That concert and all eight of CanUS Jazz Band’s eight CDs can be viewed on YouTube. Tony has also produced two cassettes of solo ragtime piano that are collectors’ items.
“Those ragtime tunes were all memorized, not played by ear, not using the side of my brain that is used in improvising,” Toni explains. “I’ve lost that repertoire now that I’m in my 80s. I don’t play that music anymore.”
At 83, Toni is still leading CanUS at Hermann’s every month. She even joined Norrie MacFarlane’s Dixieland Express for a show on Butchart Gardens’ big outdoor stage in August 2022. This year CanUS also played a couple of memorial concerts for band members Hugh Barclay, Don Leppard and Borgy Borgeson.
CanUS has had lots of members over the band’s 33-year history. Al Pease, 86, is still playing clarinet and sax. Joey Smith, the band’s original arranger, is still on bass. Avram McCagherty has settled in on banjo.
Alfons Fear is a young, modern trumpet player who is learning traditional jazz from another new member, Australian Simon Stribling. Simon learned from his musician-father and sings harmony with Toni and Alfons. Stribling also brought his Vancouver-based Canadian wife Laurie Lyster into the band on drums and vocals.
Toni couldn’t be more pleased with her new version of CanUS. She’s also in love again. Thirty-seven years after her marriage ended, the electrician working at her View Royal waterfront home asked her out on a dinner date.
“I asked Nic if he knew how old I was. I had no designs on him. He was 54. I was 79,” Toni says with a smile. “I told him we could be friends, and he asked if friends could go out to dinner. Finally, he asked, could we please leave this up to the universe?”
“That was four years ago,” Toni continues. “Nic comes over and sets up the Bluetooth Soundbar for dinner music every night. We’ll play Coleman Hawkins, Mel Torme, Les Paul and Mary Ford, Bix Beiderbecke, even Buddy Holly and Elvis. It’s so much fun.”
Snapshot
If you were to meet your 20-year-old self, what advice would you give her?
“Keep following your instincts and go in the direction you are feeling is right for you. Whatever you name it, this is somehow attuned to your destiny.”
Who or what has influenced you the most and why?
“I believe my parents trusting me and giving me both freedom and responsibility. I got a speeding ticket shortly after getting my driver’s license. Without telling them, I went to court in the nearby larger town and scratched up the money to pay. Thirty or so years later, I learned that my father was drinking in that town’s beer parlour with some RCMP guys who told him, ‘Hey Sam, we caught your daughter speeding a couple of weeks ago.’ He never let me know he knew.”
What are you most grateful for?
“I am most grateful for the gift of music that came to me through both parents who could play by ear and encouraged me in appearances in music festivals and playing in our village at church, for tap dance groups, even for a community hall meeting where Tommy Douglas was about to speak. In those days, there was a community singsong prior to such meetings. I did have one piano teacher who was the ‘classical’ of the two teachers in my village. First teacher encouraged my ear. The classical teacher, when I once suggested I thought I had better ending for one of the compositions I was learning, jumped all over me, accusing me of thinking I knew better that Johann Sebastian Bach.”
What does success mean to you?
“What I most wanted was that each year I was progressing to be a better piano player. Regarding success, I had wonderful advice from a fellow artist, Ken Bloomfield (woodcarver and clay artist), who told me that in art your job is to put yourself at your instrument every day. The ‘universe’ will take care of everything else. So that lifted a lot of worry from my shoulders about where I was going with all this.”
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