I don’t know about the rest of you folk but as I get older I do need a bit more motivation to get me out of the house these days. But the thought of John MacLeod and his Rex Hotel Jazz Orchestra playing at the Rex Hotel on the very Monday after winning the Juno Award in the traditional jazz category for their album ‘Our First Set’, managed to do the trick. And, yeah, for the record, it was well worth the Donlands-to-Osgoode subway ride, plus the $12 cover charge.
I pretty soon realized I was in the middle of something pretty special, probably available to only a handful jazz fans around the world on any given night to be able to hear the authentic big band jazz sound with 20 ace players.
I was going to interview MacLeod after the first set but then it didn’t seem right to interrupt the steady train of well wishers coming up to him to get their just-bought CDs signed. So, instead, I caught up with him on the phone the next day. And what I’ll do here is present a complete synopsis of the interview. But, first, I'll relate my impressions of the first set and keep in my mind that jazz is not my roots but is an area that I’m appreciating more and more as I age. But I was hit with the sudden feeling that this was what jazz was all about - or at least as I envisioned it to be. Despite being a Monday night, the Rex was hopping, standing room only, and the band - all twenty of them - were cooking, both in terms of the cameraderie between the players and the inspired solos. And everyone - including the band - seemed to be having the time of their lives. MacLeod was genuinely funny, although it’s a case where you had to be there to fully appreciate the humour. For instance, he pointed out, laughing, that he had an almost 100 per cent turn-out on this night from his rather large band - because the Rex had promised to cover the band’s tab.
I got the sense I was lucky to hear them and that the $12 cover was a small price to pay. I’m no expert on jazz or the music business, but I’m smart enough to know that a big band of that calibre - in fact a now Juno Award winning band - is not a particularly astute business move. I mean you do the math, and divide the door cover twenty ways!
“That would have given you a good sense of what we’re about,” agreed MacLeod during the subsquent following day phone interview. “We just get up there and you can see the guys are just enjoying themsleves. The audience are all part of it. A lot of the people are there every month which is kind of neat. It makes it kind of like family going there.”
Renowned as a trumpet player, MacLeod has been on other Juno Award CDs, in particular with Mike Murley and Brian Dickinson, and even on a Grammy Award winning album with the Boss Brass. But this was his first Juno Award CD with his name before the ‘and’, so to speak.
“It’s only my second album. The first was a vinyl back in 86 or something like that so it’s been a big gap in my recording career,” he said, laughing.
Prominent in Canada’s jazz music scene he teaches in the music programs at both the University of Toronto and Humber College. As for why he took it upon himself to form his big band,which he did in 2003, and which performs, typically, the last Monday of the month at the Rex, it was a case of ‘someone had to do it.’
“I had been working with Freeflight which is another big band which was also nominated for a Juno many years ago and when they folded it was sort of natural for me to want to form some kind of unit ... and on top of that the Boss Brass had dissolved. Personally it was a good time for me, and for the city I think it was a good thing to have a band of that calibre playing on some kind of a regular basis.”
The ‘Rex Hotel’ name, he said, “was kind of a tongue and cheek thing.” Basically, if Moxie Whitney could have his Royal York orchestra, then MacLeod wanted to have his Rex Hotel Jazz Orchestra. “It made it sound a little more pompous than it really was and I kind of liked the tongue and cheek,” he said, with another chuckle. But he also quickly pointed out that “they (the Rex) are fantastic in terms of giving a regular venue and that was part of what made the band work in the beginning.”
His theory for the band was simple.
“We have one day a month to perform. And being that it’s made up of the top professional musicians I didn’t want to rehearse the band so we basically just go in and play. The guys are good enough so that I can write brand new material and it sounds fantastic the first time out. For them (band members), I think it’s an opportunity to go out and have some fun and play some good music and have a couple of beers.”
As for how that led into a CD, he explained: “My executive producer (Joni DeAngelis) is one of my best friends and just pushed me into it. I teach at Humber College and they have a studio here which is where we did it and we get a special faculty rate and so she (De Angelis) just booked the studio and we did it just for fun, just went in for a couple of sessions.”
Around the same time he also came into “a little bit of money from an inheritance.”
“It sat in the can for eight months or something until this little inheritance came along and I thought, you know I think this would be a great way to spend that money. It was just enough to cover the cost of paying the musicians and so on. That was the major issue. I didn’t want to put it out without paying the musicians and doing everything by the book.”
His approach to the recording was the same as his approach to the monthly Rex show.
“We basically just went in and did it. The thing is we play once a month so the band has developed its own sound. And all the material we recorded we played before. The session was one of the most relaxed, easy sessions I’ve ever done. Our engineer is Ian Terry, and he basically produced it and he’s like a veteran so he had the studio set up in a way that made it really easy to play ...”
Basically the recording session turned out to be just a little longer than one of their Rex sessions.
“We did two three-hour sessions and we didn’t even use the last hour of the second session. And not only that, I think we had two pieces more than I needed. I actually had to edit two pieces out. It just went down really smooth.”
He was obviously pleased on behalf of the band that the result scooped a Juno.
“The great thing is it doesn’t sound like a studio recording. It sounds like we’re all just having fun and loose. There’s a lot of abandon in the playing. That really delighted me because it is a real jazz group in the interaction between the rhythm section and the soloists. It’s really there on the session and I wasn’t really expecting it to be like that.”
The Juno Award immediately spurred sales, both online (which he handles) and in person.
“I played in two concerts the last two days,’ he explained, in the March 29 interview. “I played at the Rex last night (March 28) so I sold a whole box last night and I was doing a concert out of town (on March 27) and I sold a whole box then so in the last two days I’ve made a thousand dollars which is pretty good. It costs about $20,000 to do it, so if I could sell a thousand I’d have enough to make another one which is my goal. I’m not interested in replacing the money, simply getting the budget together for another one.”
MacLeod is a life-long Toronto east-ender who graduated from Monarch Park CI. “I actually live in the same house I grew up in, east end, Coxwell and Gerrard area,” he said.