Volume 23 Issue 1 - September 2017

BOOK END
Taken at Basin Street, Toronto, in 1983.
Mark Miller
Claude Ranger: Canadian Jazz Legend
Toronto, self-published 2017.
ISBN: 978-1-77302-559-9
Available at indigo.ca
e-book: $ 6.99; paperback: $20.96;
hardcover: $36.50
Mark Miller has a well-earned
reputation as Canada’s foremost
writer on jazz, whether as the
Globe & Mail’s critic for a quarter century before his retirement from
journalism or for the ten books he’s previously published on the
music, many of them specifically devoted to its Canadian dimension.
With his biography of drummer Claude Ranger, however, he’s done
something quite new, a full-length biography of a Canadian musician
that gives us a more intimate glimpse into jazz in this country than
has previously been revealed.
Ranger might seem like an unlikely choice: he certainly never
achieved celebrity like Diana Krall or Oscar Peterson, or international
status as a significant innovator like Paul Bley or Kenny Wheeler.
However, while he largely laboured in the trenches, Ranger responded
singularly to the allure of jazz.
Miller’s familiarity with each of Canada’s distinctive jazz centres
(and several generations of their musicians) gives rare immediacy and
authenticity to the westward path of Ranger’s career. Born in Montreal
in 1941, he followed a trail from beating on pots and pans to playing
in Montreal showbars, then on to the city’s jazz scene, then Toronto,
eventually ending up in Vancouver where, in 2000, he disappeared.
And not in the sense of retired from the scene, preferring sunny
days on the beach or playing with the grandkids: No, Ranger literally
disappeared: an RCMP investigation launched in 2001 is still open.
Ranger was a romantic figure, a man devoted — both selflessly and
selfishly, it would seem — to jazz as art and necessary self-expression.
From the mid-60s on he was devoted to the fresh possibilities of
a changing music, fuelled by the examples of John Coltrane and Miles
Davis and their respective drummers, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams.
Working whatever Montreal gigs that might come along, Ranger first
cultivated associations with like-minded musicians, initially bassist
Michel Donato and saxophonist Brian Barley, eventually becoming
the mentor for some 25 years to younger musicians who felt the same
irresistible pull toward jazz in its more liberating forms. Despite that,
he stayed in the limiting world of Canadian jazz, held back by what
Miller calls his “demons and dependencies,” as much his creative
insecurity about being a white Canadian who finds himself in black
American music as, say, alcohol. I only saw Ranger once when he was
playing in the kind of company to which he might have aspired —
with Sonny Rollins and Donato at a Toronto benefit in 1974 — and he
was clearly a drummer of rare skill, energy, invention and intensity.
Part of the effectiveness of Miller’s chronicle comes out in his
sense of the telling detail, whether it’s the semiotics of the perpetual
smoking cigarette with hanging ash drooping from the left corner
of Ranger’s mouth, or another kind of detail, the resume writer’s,
recounting musicians’ memories of rigorous rehearsals and the scant
and sparsely attended performances that followed. Those lists are lifeblood
for many who play jazz in Canada: they make illuminating
reading for anyone interested in the music, and a cautionary tale for
anyone contemplating a career in it.
In Miller’s larger tale, Ranger hasn’t disappeared at all. He’s alive not
just in the memories of the young musicians whose lives he touched,
but in their music, whether it’s rooted in the rehearsals, the charts
he laboured over, the lessons he gave for a pack of smokes and a sixpack,
the exercises he wrote out, the drums he rebuilt, or, above all,
that fierce, unbending loyalty to the music. As Miller notes, Ranger
inspired and assisted Dylan van der Schyff and Nick Fraser, today the
finest Canadian drummers of a generation that benefits from a far
more internationalized scene.
Stuart Broomer
MARK MILLER
JAZZ at lincoln
centre orchestra
with wynton marsalis
WED SEP 20 ◆ 8 PM
FOR TICKETS CALL
416-872-4255
OR VISIT
MASSEYHALL.COM
September 2017
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