Volume 29 Issue 1 | September 2023

JAZZ NOTES
“Beautiful
Gumbo”
LONG LIVE THE REX
ANDREW SCOTT
Although not yet as canonically sacrosanct to the
history of jazz as NYC’s Minton’s Playhouse was,
Toronto’s Rex Hotel is equally important to this
city’s jazz community as both a performance venue and
a musical testing ground where creative ideas and group
concepts germinate and take root.
Guitarist Lorne Lofsky began playing there with such musicians
as saxophonists Bob Mover and Kirk MacDonald and drummer Jerry
Fuller in the late 1980s. “It’s really interesting,” he recalls, “to witness
the evolution of people’s playing at The Rex. The club is not a laboratory
exactly, but rather a magical place where musicians are free to try
things out. From that initial experimentation, groups have formed,
concepts evolved, and people have grown as players because of the
playing that we did there.”
The famed Harlem NYC nightclub, Minton’s Playhouse, existed from
1938 until a fire ripped through the Hotel Cecil that housed it in 1974.
It remains an important site to this day, discussed in reverential tones
by jazz enthusiasts coming to pay homage at the locale where modern
jazz’s equivalents of Zeus, Poseidon and Hades held court. On Monday
evenings in the early 1940s, at crowded jam sessions following
earlier Apollo Theatre performances, the Olympian“Big Three” were
Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Christian.
As much as Minton’s was a place and physical site, it is remembered
primarily as a spot of musical experimentation, ultimately
becoming the metaphorical petri dish of modern jazz. As the writer
Ralph Ellison explained in a 1959 Esquire article, the club’s Monday
Celebrity Nights incubated ever-new musical ideas, “allowing the
musicians free rein to play whatever they liked.” Yes, there were
other spots where this music was developing, but it is safe to say: no
Minton’s, no bebop.
Stumbling serendipitously: Like many “Temples of Sound,” to
borrow a phrase from William Clark and Jim Cogan’s great book, The
Rex stumbled into its place as a preeminent site of musical excellence
not by design necessarily, but rather serendipity – benefitting from the
happenstance of proximity, Situated at 194 Queen St W, it was located
just down the street from Doug Cole’s Bourbon Street, which in the
1970s and 1980s was bringing marquee name American jazz greats
to the city to perform with local rhythm sections. “A lot of musicians
who were on break at Bourbon Street would come to The Rex for the
The United Clothing
Store, with a side
entrance for the Rex
Hotel (1950s) (above),
The Rex by
David Crighton
cheaper booze and to have a
taste between sets” remembers
pianist Mark Eisenman, who
considers his performances
at The Rex as part of trumpeter
Sam Noto’s band (with
Kirk MacDonald, drummer
Bob McLaren and either Neil
Swainson or Kieran Overs on
bass) as “among his most treasured
musical memories.“
Conversely, Rex owner Bob
Ross – whose father Jack and
business partner Morris Myers
had purchased the former
Williams Hotel in 1950 as a
Avi Ross (left) and Bob Ross
“beer hotel” investment opportunity
– would cap off his
working evenings by going to Bourbon Street to unwind and hear
some music. “If it swung, I was into it,” says Ross, who cites performances
of Zoot Sims and Jackie Cain and Roy Krall as particularly
memorable.
And so, by the early 1980s, a reciprocal ecosystem of musicians
moving between Bourbon Street to The Rex Hotel was established.
The Ross family business soon went from hosting musicians looking
for an inexpensive drink at its bar, to hosting them on the stage that
had been built on the hotel’s Queen Street side (previously the United
Clothing Store that occupied the southerly portion of the building’s
ground floor).
Early and exciting musical sets by saxophonist Jim Heineman
and organist John T. Davis, with Mark Hundevad on drums, forged
performance ground at the club.
Soon a roster of local players was rotating appearances at the club,
including the brothers Lloyd (bassist) and Don “D.T” Thompson
10 | September 2023 thewholenote.com