I was working in a small and windowless CBC Radio studio in the old red brick building on Jarvis Street in Toronto. On the other end of the phone line was a man about the same age as the building named Russell Procope, a musician, one of the sidemen from the Big Band era of jazz. I was making a series of radio documentaries about the Big Bands, and we were recording Procope as he reminisced about the years they rode the trains—the Pullmans, he called them, the Pullman cars—to gigs in the American South. This was the 1930s and ’40s in the time of segregation. Black musicians like Procope were denied hotels, so trains were where they slept and ate.

Flash forward to 2021. I heard this spring that the CBC was digitizing its archives and getting rid of the original reel-to-reel tapes that went to air. Rumour had it that not everything was being digitized, and I decided to jump in. It was possible that some of the men I’d recorded had never been interviewed by anyone else. I wanted to make sure the documentaries were saved, given the important puzzle piece of history they contained. The phone interviews were brief, but I remembered the vibrancy of some of the clips, and thought they should be available to researchers who wanted to get a sense of the lives lived by the working musicians of the period, and to hear their long-gone voices.

I can still call up the rhythmic story telling of those re-min-is-cing mus-i-cians. Procope was just one of the old guys sent my way by legendary CBS Records producer John Hammond. Hammond was a central figure in the documentaries, given both his contact book and his memories. He first saw Billie Holiday when she was 17 years old and singing in a nightclub in Harlem. I sometimes think, there’s only one degree of separation between me and the great Lady Day. Hammond plumped her career in a column he wrote for the British magazine Melody Maker, and arranged her first recording session with Benny Goodman’s band. He produced recordings of the Big Bands—Benny Goodman came to be his brother-in-law—and later signed Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to CBS Records. He “discovered” them, as people used to say. About the way Columbus discovered an America that was already thoroughly populated, but hey.

I probably made the Big Band docs in the summer of 1980. I didn’t keep good records back then. At the time, I was a chase producer on CBC Radio’s As It Happens. Unlikely as it now sounds, the show’s executive producer decided that there wasn’t enough news to fill 90 minutes of air time every weekday that summer. Or maybe he didn’t have the budget to fill it, I don’t know. He assigned several of us to make half-hour documentaries for the final segment of the program, the subjects chosen so we could pull the docs together quickly using the CBC music library and archives. 

With assistance from researcher Eva Varangu, I started pulling up interviews with big-time musicians from the era. There were plenty of clips from band leaders like Duke Ellington and crooners like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, but we couldn’t find much from the musicians who had played in the bands. This struck me as a sad gap. I wanted to hear their voices, and remembered how I’d set up an As It Happens interview with John Hammond for a news piece. After leafing through my little green contact book, I called Hammond to find out how to get in touch with the sidemen, and ask whether we could record some of his own stories. 

Hammond was more than gracious. Maybe the word is insistent. He was in touch with many of the musicians, and wanted me to come down to New York and record them in their by-the-night hotel rooms and Harlem apartments on my old reel-to-reel. Take some time. Do it properly. He told me that too many of the sidemen were already gone. The others were often poor and obscure, some of them ill, most of them past performing and barely making it by. Yet their stories were golden, and if they weren’t recorded now, their memories would be lost. 

I remember asking Hammond why he couldn’t get someone in New York to do it, maybe a couple of people, at least one of them Black, since many of the musicians were Black. 

He’d tried, he told me sadly. No one was interested. The Big Band era was radically out of fashion. I was the first person who’d shown an interest in the sidemen in years. But I was too young to see the importance, too broke and only a few months married, and I ended up phoning them instead of going to New York. It’s one of my chief regrets. I could probably have wrangled time off work and whistled up some money. Aside from anything else, John Hammond was a Vanderbilt on his mother’s side. Maybe he would have spotted me a loan for a bus trip and a room at the Y. 

Maybe not. I would later be told, fondly, that Hammond was Old Money cheap. But if I’d tried, surely someone would have helped. And the opportunity slipped away.

Then somehow it was 2021.

Long story short. I now have on my computer links to two of the three Big Band documentaries I wrote and produced. CBC host Laura Lynch helped pave the way to getting them. Laura and I grew up on the same street in suburban Vancouver, but that’s a different story. She was able to vouch for me with the people in the archives, and they found re-broadcasts of the two half-hour docs from the spring of 1981. They couldn’t find the third, and unfortunately it’s the one containing most of the interviews with the sidemen, Procope aside. The reel-to-reel tapes, I was told, are long gone.

Deflating. But there’s a glimmer of hope. Presumably because of the rumours, the CBC has put out a statement promising that everything in the archives will be digitized. And in one email, an archivist told me it was too bad the third doc hadn’t been catalogued. The word leapt out. So it’s somewhere the archives, I emailed back quickly. He agreed, and told me that if it serendipitously turned up, he would get back in touch. 

Not that finding two of the documentaries does researchers any good, not right now. With work-at-home rules in place at the CBC, historians can’t get into the archives anyway. The archivists aren’t there themselves. I’m unclear what will happen once the pandemic ends—as maybe it will, someday—but as a publicly-funded corporation, surely the CBC ought to open its newly-digitized files to historians. 

Meanwhile, I don’t have the right to put the documentaries up on my website. I’d like to. The quality is good, thanks to CBC recording engineer Ron Grant and narrator Alan Maitland. But since I don’t have legal permission, I thought I’d at least make their existence known, and let some of the people we recorded have a few words, starting with Russell Procope, a charming man who played the clarinet and alto sax in Duke Ellington’s band:

“Travelling, travelling, travelling wasn’t as easy as it is now,” he told me. “They didn’t have the roads to ride on. They didn’t have the buses that they do now. Flying had just begun and we didn’t do any flying at all. We travelled a lot in cars, in automobiles, and when we made trips in the South, we travelled on Pullmans. We lived on Pullmans. We lived on a Pullman one time 41 days, just to keep from going through the hardship of trying to find a place to live, a place to stay. Place to eat. Place to have fun. So we took it with us. We took the hotel with us. We lived on a Pullman car.”

The photo above is of Russell Procope. He died on January 21, 1981, aged 72, only months after recording the interview. 

I sure hope they find that other documentary.

Jump to Part Two of this post here.