May 2nd, 2008, 10am
In the summer of 1958, photographer Art Kane gathered fifty-seven jazz musicians on a Harlem stoop for A Great Day in Harlem, one of the best-known photographs in jazz.
The picture, published in Esquire, included Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins and dozens of others. It also left out plenty of major names. Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Duke Ellington weren't there. Musicians travel, they have gigs, they have lives. Getting everyone in one place was never going to happen.
Still, the photograph became famous. If you studied jazz, there was a decent chance you had a copy of it somewhere.
In 2008, Coda Magazine was turning fifty, which happened to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Kane's photograph. Someone had the idea to mark the occasion with a Canadian version. The plan was to photograph groups of musicians in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
I ended up organizing and photographing the Vancouver one.
At the time I was shooting concerts regularly at the Jazz Cellar and contributing photographs to Coda. Getting people together was a little different in 2008. There were no group chats and Facebook events weren't yet the default answer to everything. I sent emails, made calls and asked people to tell other musicians.
Coda picked May 2 as the date.
I needed somewhere to put everyone.
My first choice was the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, but they were booked, so I went with Queen Elizabeth Park instead. There's a wide set of stone steps below the Bloedel Conservatory, with enough room for a large group and a good place for me to stand with a camera.
There was one firm instruction from Coda: take the photograph at exactly 10:00 a.m.
This seemed optimistic for a group of jazz musicians.
I got there around nine and set up. For a while nobody came.
Then bassist Al Johnson arrived.
After that, people started appearing in ones and twos, then in larger groups. Friends saw friends. People stood around talking. The top of the steps got busier.
By ten o'clock, we had 104 musicians.
That was quite a few more than I had expected.
It was a pretty good cross-section of the Vancouver scene. There were musicians who had been playing professionally for decades, students, community players and a few people who came in from outside the city. Phil Dwyer came over from Vancouver Island.
A lot of people were missing too. Some had gigs. Some were away. Some probably never got the message. Some, I assume, simply didn't feel like coming to Queen Elizabeth Park at ten in the morning.
So, like the original photograph, it was never a complete record of the scene. It was whoever showed up.
At 10:00, I took the photograph.
Once we had the main shot, I asked everyone to stay for a few more minutes.
Since I had more than a hundred musicians standing around, it seemed silly not to do something else with them. I started pulling people into groups by instrument: saxophones, trumpets, trombones, guitars, basses, organs, pianos, drums and singers.
Saxophone Section
Those photographs are probably more interesting to me now than they were at the time.
The big group shot is the obvious one, but the smaller ones are fun to look through. You can see different generations together, friends standing beside each other, and some very different ideas about how seriously to take having your photograph taken.
They also give a better sense of who was actually around Vancouver jazz at the time.
Later, I decided I should figure out who everyone was.
This was harder than it sounds.
There had been no registration. I didn't have a list of people who said they were coming. Nobody checked in when they arrived. The whole thing had spread through email, phone calls and word of mouth.
So I numbered every person in the photograph and started working through the names.
There were 104 people in the picture.
I got 103.
I still don't know who number 29 is.
The photograph is almost twenty years old now, which is strange to think about.
Some of the people in it were already well established in 2008. Some were students. Some were just starting to show up at gigs around town. Since then, people have moved, retired or died. A lot has changed.
And some things haven't.
Mostly, I'm just glad so many people got out of bed that morning.
The musicians in the photograph
All identified except number 29, who nobody could place.