I was 21 when I first came across the record entitled Jazz at Massey Hall Live by “The Quintet”. On the sleeve of the LP, the liner notes said that this was the only time that these musicians (the be-bop virtuosos Bud Powell (piano), Charles Mingus (bass), Charlie Parker (alto sax), Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), and Max Roach (drums)) had ever been recorded live together. I was anxious with anticipation when I first spun that LP and the record killed.

Jazz is a fight. Being on the bandstand is to fight to make yourself interesting and make the others interesting. This is the legacy for me of the Quintet’s performance– a one of a kind event that brands Toronto’s place in jazz history with a special and enigmatic quality of self defense in the face of the chaos of the universe.

Charlie Parker’s phrasing was inspired. Even though he had sold his brass saxophone for heroin and was playing a plastic one, each of his phrases stood alone as its own exhaustive statement. Dizzy Gillespie’s solos were in the pocket, but with his trademark calls to the wild, and sophisticated accidentals and glissandos. And as always, Dizzy surprised you with his endless vocabulary. Bud Powell’s voicings and frightfully sly rhythmic accompaniment (especially considering that he was just coming off of electric shock treatments at a sanitarium) on piano with Charles Mingus’s unmistakeable hard swinging bass sound and Max Roach’s solid, powerful, tasteful drumming made for a rhythm section that stamped this performance by jazz’s bepop titans a tour de force putting Toronto and Canada firmly on the obscure jazz map of my imagination.

Is jazz still fighting all these years later or has it become commercialized and neutered of its vitality by the mass market cannibalism of the music and communications industries? These musicians on that record innovated a whole new language with which we could understand modernity thorough individual agency and the diatonic instruments of classical music.

But does popular music need to be vital to matter anymore? Or does it simply need to shock or provide a balm? That night of the concert there was a prize fight between Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott which everyone, including Dizzy, wanted to watch. Musicians and audience members wandered out to check on the fight at the bar across the street. But the concert of the Quintet Live at Massey Hall was far more significant than that forgettable fight (Marciano won by knockout in the first round). “The Quintet” christened jazz as the martial arts of music, founding of a new form of expression featuring discipline, humility, restraint and respect in its philosophy of combat.

The Quintet Live at Massey Hall celebrates its 56th anniversary on May 15th.

Canadian national identity is a much ballyhooed (does Canadian national identity exist?) subject in our pop culture, but to my mind there has always been something that unites Canada. And it is not Molson beer. The true North strong and free: danger, responsibility, risk, and reward.

I know. Last week I was skiing past some bear prints in the snow in the Chic Choc mountains in the Haute Gaspesie with a friend when the weather came in unexpectedly, a bank of fog at the top of Mont Des Loupes. I read the map with my best navigating skills, and a compass, but the map was not declinated to magnetic north, it was simply declinated to grid north and our calculation in descent was slightly off. (Also, the map was published in 2004 and due to global warming the mountain gods had let the beard grow out turning what was tundra on the map into boreal forest: another missing declination.) So what had become an error of feet quickly turned into an error of degrees.

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When the archaeologists come and dig up the land where Davis Kovacs comes from, they will find that cars and Bruce Springsteen lived there.

I grew up on the front lines of the Cold War, a child presented with the prospect of nuclear annihilation as a certain eventuality; thus, my most comforting pre-pubescent evenings were those when I was able to tune in the French radio from Québec broadcasting the Canadiens games through to my digital alarm clock perched at the side of my bed in the suburbs of New York City.

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When I went to Auschwitz I was only 21. I took the train from Budapest to Kraków and then from Kraków I took a bus – an excursion tour to Auschwitz. The tour began with a visit to the ovens at the original Auschwitz. There were two ovens and the ovens fit one body each. It was mind-boggling but the presentation was oddly sterile and genteel. Auschwitz looked surprisingly well-kempt and nicely organized. I would later read in the brilliant book THIS WAY FOR THE GAS LADIES AND GENTLEMAN by Tadeusz Borowski, a onetime capo at Auschwitz II, that Auschwitz I was the much envied sister camp, where the Germans

maintained the pretty Jewish girls whom they put to work as prostitutes.

At Auschwitz I, the buildings were constructed of brick and the camp had held up well over the forty years. But it is when I went to Auschwitz II, the “optional” part of the tour, a few miles away, that I saw the true enormity of the horror: The five crematoria, the vast train station within the camp where the extermination selections were made, the countless burned out wooden barracks where prisoners feigned sleep crammed together in their huddled, courageous, petrified masses. At Auschwitz II these structures were more like shoddy chicken coups than anything suited for human habitation.

There I entered one of the many gas chambers where the Nazis unthinkably dropped poison pellets over a people they had told they would be showering. Murdered by chemical weapon like bankable slaughter (gold teeth were removed and melted down) after toiling to starvation under a banner of Arbeit Macht Frei, these souls were the victims of 2000 years of anti-semitism, victims of the worst kind of cruelty the human heart has ever known.

I am but an aimless tourist, an unwilling heir to this crime, yet still today I am haunted from having ambled into the gas chamber that afternoon to look up at the little poison holes, the light streaming in.

The three videos of Holocaust survivors posted here are remarkable. As haunting as the gas chamber was for me, these stories are as inspiring. To understand the trajectories of Marcel, Rosa and Musia is to understand the strength of the human spirit. To witness the dignity inherent in the ascent from such a thoroughly compromised position is to gain access to a trajectory that represents a much broader spectrum of humanity than my generation of Canadians (all of us cocooned in our protective shells) has had the opportunity to experience.

And perhaps this is the most important lesson from these videos: Musia repeats here what Borowski immortalized in that book. That already in Auschwitz Kanada [sic.] had the reputation of being that warm, permeable cocoon which could provide a welcome to refugees of all kinds— giving them quarter, a space to grow. If we are to judge from the sentiments in these videos, we might indeed come to this same conclusion: that Canada may very well be the safest harbor in the maelstrom that is this Earth’s chaos.

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