David Neil Lee Reviews Mark Miller’s Of Stars and Strings: A Biography of Sonny Greenwich

Of Stars and Strings: A Biography of Sonny Greenwich. Mark Miller. Self-published, 2020. $25.99 CDN, 322 pp., ISBN 978-0-228827-77-1

Jazz is a music that favours the player rather than the composer; the Great Works of jazz are not written scores, but recorded performances, and improvisation is such an intrinsic part of the music that only rarely can those performances be reproduced, even approximately, by other musicians. No one plays a Duke Ellington piece hoping to sound like Duke Ellington; for the player, the composition is raw material (one might call it a “use-object”) to be extrapolated, built upon, and shaped through performance into something truly one-of-a-kind .

As a result, the music is full of player/composers who are in a class by themselves. This is true, yes, even in Canada. In general, Canadian cities are smaller than the major US centres; they spawn tiny alternative-music communities, and their Black neighbourhoods – throughout the 20th century, the originators and nurturers of jazz practice – are even smaller. 

Out of one of these Black Canadian communities, however – in Hamilton, a mid-sized Ontario steel town – came a distinctive guitarist who had the potential to become a major jazz voice and influence on a level with the Americans who created and defined the genre. Sonny Greenwich should be a household name in Canadian music, and he would be, had he been better able to navigate the treacherous currents of the music business, both inside and outside Canada. 

Greenwich, however, faces the historical disadvantage that all jazz musicians face – the fact that no matter how hard they work to get their music out there, even hundreds of performances before thousands of people don’t do much to build a permanent archive. Once music is played it is, as Eric Dolphy said, gone in the air. In all musics except classical music (with its canon of written scores), consecration usually depends on being recorded on a label that is well-funded and widely-distributed enough to have its own cachet (Billie Holiday on Verve, Miles Davis on Columbia, John Coltrane on Impulse!); the Greenwich discography, however, mostly consists of labels that, like him, have been hard-working, distinctively original, but perhaps a bit out-of-the-way – in short, essentially Canadian.

In this absence of written scores, or canonic recordings, the best that a jazz musician might hope for is that someone notices their qualities and celebrates them in writing – the written word that survives the present moment. From that point of view, for Sonny Greenwich the best thing that could happen to a Canadian jazz musician has happened – Mark Miller has written a book about him.

Miller began writing about jazz in the Globe and Mail while still in his twenties, and in 1982, with the publication of his first book, Jazz in Canada: Fourteen Lives, invented an authorial category that up to that point, was essentially waiting for someone to invent it: the Canadian jazz journalist who puts the music, as made in Canada, front and centre in their interests. In doing so, Miller essentially created the history and practice of jazz in Canada as an area of serious study, and with his own depth of knowledge, sensitivity of analysis and meticulousness of research, set a high standard.

Miller’s chronicles and critiques of Canadian jazz have a special inclination towards what he calls “musicians and narratives lost, forgotten, or otherwise overlooked in jazz history.” Along with two collections of short portraits of Canadian musicians, he wrote the invaluable reference work The Miller Companion to Jazz in Canada and Canadians in Jazz (2001). He has written about the international dissemination of American jazz (Some Hustling This!, 2005), the little-known but influential Herbie Nichols (A Jazzist’s Life, 2009), the once-famous-but-forgotten Valaida Snow (High Hat, Trumpet and Rhythm, 2007), Charlie Parker’s and Lonnie Johnson’s sojourns in Canada (Cool Blues, 1989; Way Down That Lonesome Road, 2011), and the mercurial drummer Claude Ranger (Claude Ranger: Canadian Jazz Legend, 2017). Miller’s specialty is the improvising virtuoso who struggles to keep on making fascinating music throughout a frustrating career, and his writing is infused with the irony that is implicit in the jazz life. In short, there’s no writer better equipped to write Of Stars and Strings: A Biography of Sonny Greenwich. 

Born Herbert Lawrence Greenidge in Hamilton in 1936, Greenwich began playing jam sessions, jazz gigs, and R&B club dates in Toronto in the 1950s, and spent much of his subsequent career alternating between Toronto and Montreal as a home base. Chief among his influences, besides other guitarists, were the Black American saxophonists Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, both musical innovators, both outspoken in their political and spiritual concerns. In the 1960s, Greenwich found in Coltrane especially a focus, and a model for making music, that reflected his own growing interest in Eastern religions and mysticism. He once told journalist Peter Goddard, “I feel the space between my hands is God.” 

It was also during the 1960s that Greenwich’s name started to circulate in jazz circles; time spent touring the USA with saxophonist John Handy contributed to his reputation as, in fellow guitarist Mike Bloomfield’s words, “the Coltrane of guitar players.”

At its best Greenwich’s music, a kind of modal jazz anchored by huge piano chords and propulsive drums, sounded very free. Miller writes that Greenwich was “one of the first guitarists – and certainly the first Canadian – to embrace….The incantatory, transcendent tradition of “spiritual jazz” attendant to the American avant-garde of the mid-1960s.” That such adventurous music was able to generate a fan base was exceptional in an era when jazz venues were shifting from week-long bar stints at union scale, to sporadic one-nighters where a musician was lucky to earn a day’s worth of subsistence from a night’s worth of music. If the business itself wasn’t getting hard enough, an aversion to flying also blocked Greenwich from touring opportunities, and his professional decisions were marked by powerful clashes between ego and anxiety, “leaving him,” Miller writes, “ – at least in his own mind – misunderstood, an outsider.” Even invitations from saxophonist Wayne Shorter (in the midst of his career-making stint with star trumpeter Miles Davis), and from Davis himself couldn’t get Greenwich to leave Canada, so he spent the majority of his career playing occasional gigs in out-of-the way venues from which no amount of good press or persuasion (Greenwich had his fair share of both) could extricate him.

Mark Miller is as always, sensitive to the particular situation of the contemporary jazz performer: an artist who can wield immense power when they’re actually onstage, but who fades into the shadows once those brief minutes in the spotlight are over. Of Stars and Strings tells the story not only of an artist who should be known to all Canadians, but of an art form, its listenership small, that only survives through sheer persistence. 

The same could be said for Canadian jazz writers themselves: even Jack Chambers (whose Miles Davis biography was famously cribbed by Davis himself for his 1989 autobiography) has self-published his recent collection of Duke Ellington essays, and Of Stars and Strings – an excellent exploration of one of the great hidden talents of Canadian music – published by Miller himself, can only be ordered online, from Indigo.

David Neil Lee’s books about jazz are The Battle of the Five Spot: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field (Wolsak & Wynn 2014) and Stopping Time: Paul Bley and the Transformation of Jazz (Véhicule 1999; soon available in Italian from Quodlibet, Macerata). His latest book, The Medusa Deep (Wolsak and Wynn, June 2021), is the sequel to his Lovecraftian YA novel The Midnight Games (2015), which won the Hamilton Arts Council’s Kerry Schooley award for the book that “best conveys the spirit of Hamilton.”