R.I.P. John Norris

Jazz journalist Doug Ramsey, here, and this blog's friend Gary Laurence Murphy, here, have noted Sunday's passing of John Norris, who was a triple threat of Canadian jazz. A British ex-pat who moved to Montreal in the mid-1950s and then to Toronto soon after, Norris founded (with his business partner Bill Smith, Coda magazine, and then Sackville Records and then the Jazz and Blues Centre.

Their record label most likely had the largest profile in the jazz world at large, documenting a wide range of music from traditionalists such as Jay McShann, Ralph Sutton and clarinetist Herb Hall, heard below during a 1979 Toronto performance



to Julius Hemphill and Archie Shepp, heard in this clip from what is likely the session that resulted in the 1981 Sackville CD, I Know About The Life.



My favourite jazz CD of 2008, Don Thompson's For Kenny Wheeler, was a Sackville release. I met Norris and chatted with him a few times in the early 1980s, when every trip I made to Toronto included a stop at the Jazz and Blues Centre.

Here's the Canadian Encyclopedia's entry on Norris, who was 76 when he died on Sunday.

John Norris. Critic, editor, broadcaster, promoter, record producer, b West Clandon, Surrey, England, 9 Jun 1934. While a clerk in London, he operated his first jazz club. Moving to Canada, he operated the Montreal Traditional Jazz Society 1956-7. In 1957 he settled in Toronto, where he operated the Traditional Jazz Club of Toronto, opened the Galleon jazz club, and promoted concerts. In 1958 he established the magazine Coda, serving until 1976 as editor and thereafter (with Bill Smith) as co-publisher. Norris was the manager 1962-8 of the jazz department of the Sam the Record Man store on Yonge St., Toronto, and developed there one of the most extensive stocks of jazz recordings in the world, rivalled later by the combined retail and mail-order operation of the Jazz and Blues Centre, which Norris and Smith established in 1970.

Rest in peace, John Norris.