Saxophonist Don Palmer and I meet outside Toronto’s Ossington subway station, on a brilliant spring day. Now 66, Palmer has moved recently to Toronto after three decades in Nova Scotia. He looks good – his hair greyed but retaining a surprising amount of its original bright red – and he’s an animated conversationalist, with a sizeable fund of anecdotes and insights accumulated over years on the New York jazz scene and as a jazz educator in Canada. But looks can be deceptive: the past two years have been difficult ones, after a fall that knocked out his top front teeth and left him fearing he’d never play again. This turn of events was especially unfortunate for a musician who, because of his years in the out-of-the-way Maritime jazz scene, is often better known as a teacher – past students include Mike Murley, Kirk MacDonald, Joel Miller, and a host of others – than as a player in his own right. The good news, though, is that Palmer has been gradually regaining his chops, and that he’s now reasserting his primary identity as a player rather than just an teacher.

Once we settled into a nearby café, he began with a sketch of his Cape Breton childhood. Don Palmer was born in 1939 in Sydney, Nova Scotia; his father, Chipper Palmer, worked for CNR, but also sang: “I have an old clip from the paper that says ‘Charlie Hilcoat’s Band, Featuring Cape Breton’s Own Bing Crosby, Chipper Palmer.’ ” Celtic music was in the air, but Palmer also heard the touring big bands of the day: “Duke Ellington was through, Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong. When I was about three years old my parents took me to my cousin’s house. We went to bed, and in the middle of the night we woke up and went downstairs and the house is full of black people. At that point in my life I don’t know if I’d ever seen a black person. And it turns out that the Cab Calloway band had played and they’d brought them back to the house for a party.”

Palmer took up piano, then clarinet. “Music had started to take over my thoughts, and by the time I got to grade 12 I didn’t even show up at school anymore. My cousin and I used to go to the park and smoke cigarettes and scat-sing.” After high school he decided to pursue music by joining the Canadian Army Band. “I was there from 17 until 20, and I was the baby in the band – the average age of it was 35. In the band, I learned to read well. The stuff we worked on was so hard that I never saw anything that hard again. I learned Hindemith’s Symphony for Wind Instruments when I was 18! The first time I ever heard Bach I played him – the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.” His roommate, vibraphonist Warren Chiasson, was an important mentor: “[He] largely opened the world to me. He was playing the new chord changes, he could improvise . . . he was a jazz musician.” Palmer and his friends constantly sought out jam sessions, eventually pooling their resources to open a basement club on Barrington Street: “We charged 75 cents to get in, and we paid the rent with that. And then we had the club the rest of the week, just to rehearse or take girls down there.”

Palmer was still playing clarinet, and had taken up flute. “Then I heard Lee Konitz on a record and that just changed everything. I went to a friend’s house and he wasn’t in. So I went in, and there was this record he had just got, Lee Konitz’s Very Cool, and I put it on his turntable. It was one of those that at the end it goes back to the start. I laid down on his couch, waiting for him, and he didn’t show up for an hour and a half or two hours. And this record was going, and I was asleep most of this time. When I got up I could sing every note on the record.” Chiasson, who was by now in New York, put Palmer in touch with Konitz. “That very second, everything changed. I knew where I was going.”

Palmer recalls that what impressed him most when he first entered Konitz’s New York studio “was the incredible integrity with which he approached what he was doing. I’d never seen anything like that. He was on a downer part of his career I think – he had sort of gone out of fashion in a way – and to watch Lee deal with that, and yet keep his focus on what he was doing, was a real lesson.” Palmer spent several years studying with Konitz and his mentor, the pianist Lennie Tristano. “It was a basic musical education. We rarely talked about the saxophone. In fact, Lennie probably talked to me more about the saxophone than Lee did.” He learned to sing – then later play – solos by Lester Young and Charlie Parker, and to follow Billie Holiday and Sinatra’s phrasing of a melody. “I would never learn the chord changes to a tune until I already knew it. The idea was to ferret out everything you can with your own ear. – Psychology was a big part of it. Sometimes we wouldn’t play a note: I’d walk in and ask a question and an hour later we’d still be talking. One of the tenets that Lennie and Lee talked about was not thinking about what you’re playing. Just hearing the music. The idea was just to play and not be thinking ‘now do this’ or ‘do they like me?’ or ‘I know a good lick that’ll get them going.’ We worked hard on . . . not thinking that way. One night [at the Half-Note] Lee was playing a solo, and he just stopped at one point and was standing there with his horn. Then they went past the chorus and he still hadn’t played a note. And – then he started playing again. On the break I said ‘What was that? You sorta stopped in the middle – why did you do that?’ He said, ‘I had nothing to say.’ What a lesson that was for a 21-year-old kid! I thought you were supposed to play. I never thought about why I would play. So many people just play all that shit . . . and go hear him tomorrow night and he plays it all again. When Lee Konitz had nothing to say, he just said nothing. And I thought, it takes courage to stand up on a bandstand doing nothing.”

Palmer found work with some of the surviving big bands of the period – Les and Larry Elgart, Claude Thornhill, Billy May – then in the late 1960s began to work in Latin bands. “I auditioned [in Machito’s band], and the first night, Mario Bauza, who was the lead alto player, turned to me and said, ‘You ever played this music before?’ I said, ‘No, I’ve never played anything like this in my life!’ And he says, ‘That’s . . . pretty good!’ It was as natural as falling off a log. So they hired me. On Machito’s band I did most of the soloing, except when I got Lee on the band for a couple of weeks – he played tenor for them.

“We played opposite Tito Puente’s band quite a lot, and when their alto player left they called me. That was a seven night a week gig. Tito was just a thrill to be with. He was the most unbelievable musical force I was ever close to. Little guy, and every note was just like this [grimacing fiercely], all night long! The force of that band was shocking. I used to bring friends in, jazz musicians who I was playing with in the rest of my life, and nobody ever left saying anything less than ‘Holy fuck! You guys do that every fucking night?’ A friend of mine came in; we were on this little bandstand, and he sat right there on a chair in front of us. We hadn’t played a note yet. Tito had about twenty openers that would just blow your head off, and that night I asked him, ‘Play that one . . . just for me.’ ‘OK!’ And we hit the first beat, and we played together like one man, with fourteen horns! And Frank fell right off the chair. He was laying there and laughing like hell.

“The baritone player and I were the main soloists. Up to that point there were very few Latin players that could play even Latin-style on alto – Paquito D’Rivera and those guys hadn’t shown up yet. That chair I played was almost always a gringo. And for many periods I was the only gringo in the band. I was a bit of a curiosity with the red beard and the red hair. We went to Venezuela, and they called me ‘Barbarosa,’ which means ‘redbeard’ in Spanish. People would scream – I was a star, but nobody knew who I was, I was just ‘Barbarosa,’ that red guy with Tito Puente.

“The Latin thing lasted about five years and finally I realized I had to get out – I’d learned about as much as I was going to learn. So I quit.” Freelancing work was plentiful, especially since his apartment at 53rd and 8th was only minutes away from Broadway and most recording studios: “After I left Tito’s band, I’d start every Monday without a job for the rest of my life. And by Saturday I’d have worked four days. I’d been there for twelve, thirteen years and I knew a lot of people. So everything was going pretty well.”

It was in late 1973 that a call from the CBC brought Palmer back to Nova Scotia, at first just for a television appearance in Halifax with the Cape Breton Big Band. He did a music clinic in Waterford – “Kirk MacDonald and Tom Roach were in that band – they were thirteen years old” – then returned for a stint as artist-in-residence at the College of Cape Breton, meanwhile discovering that the Halifax scene was getting more active. “Joe Sealy was there, Skip [Beckwith] had come home. Peter Gzowski had a television show for a couple of years, and we were the band.” The restaurant/jazz club Pepe’s opened up: “they started bringing Milt Jackson, Buddy DeFranco, Joe Williams, all these great people, and we played with them.” Eventually Palmer became an instructor at Dalhousie University, running the jazz program and teaching a jazz history course. (“It became the most popular class in Dalhousie – at the end I had over 135 people in it.”) His decision to stay came gradually; only when his daughter was born, he says, did he realize he wasn’t returning to New York: “I couldn’t bring her up there, and I didn’t want to leave just like that.” In retrospect he’s somewhat rueful about this career shift – “little by little things started creeping up . . . and all of a sudden I was a teacher who played a bit” – but he remains proud of his work as a teacher. “A big part of [the decision to stay] was Kirk and those kids, because I thought, I’d got them to a point now if I walk out now it’ll really hurt. And Kirk has told me how important that was to his life. He was the first real student I ever had. Folks still hug me and say ‘if it wasn’t for you. . . .’ I was playing at the Rex once, and a kid came up and introduced himself: ‘Hi, I’m your grandson.’ My first thought was ‘My God! How old are you?’ But what he meant was he was studying with Kirk.”

Palmer became a fixture on the Halifax jazz scene – a co-founder of the Atlantic Jazz Festival, and a member of a variety of ensembles, from a duet with pianist Paul Simons to Paul Cram’s avantgarde big band to the new-music collective Upstream. Some of his best music came in the trio Alive and Well with bassist Skip Beckwith and drummer Jerry Granelli, which took a spontaneous, inside/outside approach to jazz standards: “Even the stuff that was less ‘open’ ended up being that way quite often. I’m six months older than Skip, a year and a half older than Jerry, and we just knew everything, we had the same experiences. The only time we ever rehearsed was for our second record, because it had a few tunes we didn’t know yet, but other than that we just played. I could trust those guys in every way.” (Their first album, In Concert, remains Palmer’s favourite among his recordings; it’s an excellent place to sample his pungent sound and twisty improvising, full of wide, Dolphyish leaps.) But Palmer rarely toured, and in Halifax opportunities to play gradually dried up. “By the end, about three or four years ago, there was nothing to do – there were no jazz clubs at all, and only a few people I could play with. And when I smashed my teeth I took it as a message, that if I don’t do something it’ll just fade away.”

About the accident, Palmer says: “It took four months before I could play a note. I was trying to play the flute through this hole but I couldn’t do it.” His dentist’s eventual solution was an elegant removable metal circlet holding the two false teeth in place. “It doesn’t get in my way at all. It’ll always be weird: when I touch it with my tongue I can’t not be aware what I’m touching isn’t the back of my teeth. When I first started back it was terrifying. One thing most non-saxophone players don’t think about is that you hear a lot of what you do through your teeth, which are connected to the bones of your head. And there’s no connection there anymore. I thought ‘I can’t go out and play this kind of noise that I’m making,’ I couldn’t control anything, but little by little it’s coming. There’s just certain little things – I always liked big intervals, it’s a very dramatic sounding thing, but it’s very difficult at the moment. When I pick it up in the morning I sound like I never played anything before. And then within ten or fifteen minutes it starts to get organized. There’s probably things I will never actually do again, but if I’m not thinking about them, it don’t matter.”

In Toronto, Palmer is now teaching a little; he’s also been digging through his collection of unreleased tapes, with the idea of putting them out on CD. But his main focus is just on playing. A few weeks before our interview, he played his first gig as a leader since the accident, a quartet performance at The Pilot where you could sense his delight in the top-notch company – trumpeter John MacLeod, guitarist Reg Schwager, and bassist Steve Wallace. Palmer remains a one-of-a-kind saxophonist – a listening player, above all, whose music is shaped by his passionate response to the improvised moment. His unusual range of experience – from cool-school jazz to Latin to avant-garde – comes out in everything he plays. As he remarked towards the end of our interview: “Most of what I’ve done has taught me something. I try to stay pretty aware of what’s going on. Except when I’m playing – then I just want to hear a note in my head, and try and get it out of the horn.”

Selected Discography

 

As leader/co-leader:

Sailing Home (with Joe Sealy, Skip Beckwith and Tim Cohoon) (Solar, 1976)

Alive and Well, In Concert (Unity, 1992)

Alive and Well, Way Out East (Perimeter, 2000)

 

As sideman:

Tito Puente, Pa’lante! (Straight!) (Tico, 1970)

Tito Puente, Para Los Rumberos (Tico, 1972)

Tito Puente, And His Concert Orchestra (Tico, 1973)

Lee Konitz, Chicago and All That Jazz (Denon, 1975)

Atlantic Jazz Sessions (producer and soloist) (C100, late 1980s)

Upstream, Open Waters (Undercurrent, 1992)

Maritime Jazz Orchestra, featuring Kenny Wheeler, Who Are You? (MJO, 1995)

Benghazi Saxophone Quartet, Night Time Uptown (Justin Time, 1997)

Benghazi Saxophone Quartet, On The Lam (Benghazi Sax, 1998)

Paul Cram Orchestra, Campin’ Out (Victo, 2001)

Nate Dorward

Coda, September/October 2005