As I write this, Robin Engelman’s website is filling up with dozens of tributes, both moving and humorous, from around the world. CBC Radio broadcaster Tom Allen, on his show Shift, eulogized Robin for his “voracious love of life and pursuit of knowledge,” for his “integrity and passion for getting things right.”

Percussionist, music teacher, composer, oenophile and amateur golfer Robin Engelman had an active musical career ranging over half a century conducted at the highest artistic level, so perspectives on his life and work will be many, varied and likely, as often as not, focused as much on the individuals he influenced as on Robin himself. He enlivened many lives, mine included. Here is my take on it.

His musical path began in the US, but his distinguished contribution to Toronto’s musical life was wide and deep. As a percussionist he had extended engagements with our symphony orchestra under the eminent conductors Seiji Ozawa and Karel Ančerl, our opera company, and for more than 15 years with New Music Concerts. It was, however, his nearly four decades performing with Nexus that most keenly defined his career as a musician.

Being an avid Toronto concertgoer and an active contemporary music student, then musician and composer, I witnessed and savoured Robin’s work in each of his roles from the 1960s on. Witnessing him among his varied colleagues in the act of musicking proved to be defining musical moments, keys of inspiration. They helped to unlock the doors of my own musical journey.

He was also a passionately critical teacher and musical mentor to generations of percussionists. Though I was never formally his student, our paths first crossed at York University in the early 1970s. I was already an undergrad there, focused on the bassoon, composition and ethnomusicology, when Robin made his presence known, and felt, as an instructor of percussion there. His studio at Founders College, chock-a-block with orchestral and non-Western percussion instruments, was heady turf for young musical keeners like me.

In this early 1970s photo, Engelman is playing the standard drum practice pad with an intense musical focus, not on his instrument his hands or thoughts, but rather on his musical partner of the moment. With drumsticks in hand, he’s tackling “Three Camps” (according to his own caption to the photo) with his illustrious York University colleague, my teacher and later fellow performer, Trichy Sankaran, here playing the kanjira. They’re surrounded by the tools of Robin’s trade. Looking closer, we see they’re poised like two dancers, the tension and excitement of their musical dialogue palpable in their body language and gaze.

With minimalism in the York air – and Nexus right in the thick of it (more on that later) – I started a student percussion-centric group which made its own music cheekily tagged R[hythm] Pals. Robin encouraged me and permitted us to rehearse at his studio. He also generously allowed us to use his instruments, including the kulintang, a gongchime from the Southern Philippines, which I played extensively in the ensemble in concerts at York, A Space, The Music Gallery and at the University of Western Ontario, London. That kulintang, the gong ensemble in which it is featured, R-Pals, as well as the numerous performances of Nexus I attended at the time, were all determining factors in setting the tone for my lifelong taste for the sounds of percussion, and more specifically, gong ensembles.

That specific sonic taste for gongs has morphed into a career-long deep and abiding affection, exemplified most enduringly in my 33 years with Toronto’s Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan, Canada’s pioneering ensemble of its kind. Robin had, over the decades, attended a number of ECCG concerts, partly because he was genuinely passionate about avant-garde music, but in large part I think, in order to support – and sometimes challenge – the local community of percussionists, many of whom considered him a mentor. As more of his former University of Toronto students began to perform with the group, Robin made it a point to see what we were doing. In 2014, he even published his review of an ECCG concert on his website. Following a lifelong practice of telling it as he saw and heard it, he pulled no punches!

On April 14, Soundstreams will present “Steve Reich at 80,” in celebration of one of the shakers of musical minimalism, and as I had alluded to earlier, there’s a Robin and Nexus connection here too. Nexus co-founders Russell Hartenberger and Bob Becker were both also original members of the seminal Steve Reich and Musicians, formed in 1966. Then, when Nexus was born in 1971 in Toronto, Robin was on board as a charter member. During their many extensive residencies, national and international tours, Robin was there (installments of his tour diaries can be read on the Nexus website). And Reich’s music was often on the program. His minimalist masterwork, Music for Pieces of Wood, videoed in a 1984 Tokyo concert, has surpassed 242,000 YouTube views.

Returning once more to that evocative early 1970s photo of Sankaran and Robin, to me it captures a key feature of that era’s York University music scene and Robin’s place in it. In retrospect, the place was at the beating heart of a kind of transcultural music making, and for a few (trans)formative years I was privileged to be part of it. I’ve spent a career since exploring several such musical broader crossings and meetings. That photo reminds us that Robin’s York studio was one of its early touchstones, while his continuing friendship was yet another. He is already missed by many.

The WholeNote’s regular world music columnist, Andrew Timar, is a Toronto musician and music writer.

Paul Bley who died at 83 in early January was probably never bothered that he was usually described as Canada’s second-best-known jazz pianist; Oscar Peterson was the first. But Bley, who shared a Montreal birth with Peterson, and who similarly was honoured with induction into the Order of Canada in 2008 – albeit 30-plus years after Peterson – was for all intents and purposes a much more radical pianist than O.P.

Peterson, seven years Bley’s senior, was a flamboyant stylist who adapted Art Tatum’s all-encompassing swing era techniques to the structure of modern jazz during an almost incalculable number of performances from the late 1940s until his death in 2007. However Bley, represented on more than 100 discs during his career, cycled through a variety of keyboard strategies from the outgoing to the cerebral, eventually matching the atonality of off-centre techniques with straightforward, melodically measured motion. He was also one of the first serious improvisers to deal with the sonic possibilities that could be extracted from the then brand-new portable Moog synthesizer. Later, such better-known pianists as Keith Jarrett, The Bad Plus’ Ethan Iverson and Satoko Fujii developed their playing following the examples of Bley’s breakthroughs.

As a teenaged boogie-woogie specialist “Buzzy” Bley, born in 1932, was gigging locally at 13 and briefly took over Peterson’s regular gig at Montreal’s Alberta Lounge in 1949, when the latter made his New York debut. The next year Bley moved south to study at New York’s Juilliard School of Music, and by the mid-1950s had not only recorded with alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, be-bop’s avatar, but made his first LP Introducing Paul Bley, on Debut records, in a trio with legendary modernists, bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Art Blakey. Bley, who had married pianist/composer Carla Bley – née Karen Borg – was leading a conventional Modern Jazz Quartet-styled combo in Los Angeles in 1958, when he let his bassist Charlie Haden’s friends, alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman and pocket trumpeter Don Cherry, sit in. Coleman’s revolutionary restructuring of the then-accepted jazz basics – so that improvisations didn’t have to be based on the initial structure and where every player was free to contribute his variants to the tune – was a revelation to and influence on Bley.

Back in New York, Bley became a charter member of the so-called New Thing and the Jazz Composers Guild, alongside certified avant-gardists such as militant tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, bandleader Sun Ra and pianist Cecil Taylor, among others. He expressed his new-found polytonal keyboard freedom on two 1960s LPs for the ESP label. One, Barrage, was with a quintet including drummer Milford Graves and the Sun Ra Arkestra’s alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, and included distinctive cover art work by Canadian visual artist Michael Snow. Closer, a session with bassist Steve Swallow and drummer Barry Altschul, was one of the multitude of trio discs Bley would make with a succession of bassists and drummers during the 1960s and 1970s. On it, Bley redefined the idea of interplay in the jazz trio in a method much different than Peterson’s traditional follow-the-leader approach. It was this conception of bluesy yet cerebral intensity that welcomed other players’ ideas at any time, which influenced Jarrett and many other keyboardists. Earlier, Bley and Swallow had been part of multi-reedist Jimmy Giuffre’s drummer-less trio, which played hushed chamber jazz informed by folksy themes and European atonality. The band’s masterpiece was Free Fall (Columbia), and it and the trio’s other discs are generally acknowledged as the initial influence on ECM Records’ characteristic sound.

Meanwhile Closer could also describe Bley’s relationship with his favourite composers of the era. Except for the odd original, standard and Coleman covers, the majority of his repertoire – including certified jazz classics like Ida Lupino, And Now the Queen and Ictus – was composed by Carla Bley. After they separated, his next companion, singer/keyboardist Annette Peacock, composed much of the material he played. As late as 1992 he recorded an entire disc consisting of Peacock material simply entitled Annette (hatOLOGY). His associates were bassist Gary Peacock and Viennese flugelhornist Franz Koglmann. Bley’s sparse piano ruminations that terminated when he was satisfied, not according to conventional structures, plus his low-key articulation also appealed to the growing European free music experimenters. Besides work with Koglmann and Swiss reedist Hans Koch, some of his best latter day sessions were with Europeans: Time Will Tell and Sankt Gerold Variations 1-12 recorded for ECM in the mid-1990s with British saxophonist Evan Parker and long-time American-in-France, bassist Barre Phillps; Chaos (Soul Note) with British drummer Tony Oxley and Italian bassist Furio di Castri; and Florida with Danish drummer Kresten Osgood.

Bley’s association with Annette Peacock was around the same time as he began experimenting with the Moog. Besides recording several discs showing off its parameters, he was the first improviser to adapt the analog keyboard synthesizer for live performances. After spending a couple of years working out strategies for multi-keyboard and patch chording, Bley abandoned the synth and returned to piano. After that he was usually recorded in classic piano trio or solo piano formats. The exquisite Play Blue (ECM), a meditative solo disc recorded in 2008 and released in 2014, is his final session as of this time.

Although Bley left the synthesizer for others to explore he didn’t give up on multimedia. With his wife, video artist Carol Goss who survives him, for a decade starting in 1974 he co-founded and ran Improvising Artists Inc. (IAI), which recorded 20 discs and some of the first music videos. Besides his own work, Bley and IAI put out discs by established improvisers such as Peacock, Giuffre, Ra and saxophonist Sam Rivers as well as younger discoveries. Jaco, IAI’s sixth release with Bley on electric piano and Bruce Ditmas on drums, was the studio recording debut of future jazz superstars, guitarist Pat Metheney and electric bassist Jaco Pastorius.

During the 1990s Bley also taught part-time at Boston’s New England Conservatory. Among his many students was Japanese pianist Satoko Fujii. Her first CD, Something about Water (Libra) from 1995, is a duo date with Bley. Similarly, although he hadn’t lived in Canada for about half a century, along with his other projects, Bley recorded a series of albums with several Canadians during the 1990s and aughts. They included such well-received efforts as Double Time with flutist Jane Bunnett; Outside In with guitarist Sonny Greenwich; Know Time with drummer Geordie McDonald and trumpeter Herbie Spanier; Touché with fellow expatriate Canadian, flugelhornist Kenny Wheeler; and Travelling Lights featuring saxophonist François Carrier and drummer Michel Lambert, all on Justin Time records.

No matter whether he played in duo or larger formations, Bley’s off-handed mastery, which combined narrative delicacy with rhythmic astringency, was always completely original and instantly identifiable. What better epitaph than that can there be for an improvising musician?

Ken Waxman’s column Something in the Air is a regular feature of The WholeNote’s CD review section, DISCoveries.

Much has been written about Jacques Israelievitch and his remarkable career since his untimely death on September 5, 2015. Instead of repeating his extensive biography, I want to write about him from the heart, as a dear friend and esteemed colleague. His wonderful qualities as a kind, gentle and spiritual man made him an extraordinary musician and artist. He was a loving and devoted husband, father and grandfather.

I loved the way he called his wife, Gabrielle, “angel” and held her hand. I loved the way he beamed with pride when speaking about his three sons and two grandchildren. I loved the way he cared about his students, musical friends and artists. I loved the way he Skyped his mother in France almost every time we rehearsed. I loved the way he always encouraged, supported and inspired me during concerts and recording.

June of this year brought a rash of deaths which rocked the jazz community – locally, bassist Lenny Boyd and drummer Archie Alleyne – and internationally, jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman and third-stream-composer Gunther Schuller. I wrote memorial blogs about Coleman, Schuller and Boyd, who was my bass teacher. These can be read by accessing my site at wallacebass.com. I wasn’t going to write about Archie Alleyne’s yet: I just didn’t have another obituary piece about such a good friend in me. And then David Perlman – the editor of this publication – asked me to write about Archie in this issue of The WholeNote.

Oddly, it was while attending the early spring memorial celebration of Jim Galloway – who used to write in these very pages – that I first learned that Archie was seriously ill. I hadn’t seen Archie in some time and while looking about for him at Jim’s event I was told that he wasn’t expected to live through the summer, a body blow. He didn’t even make it that far, dying on June 8 of prostate cancer. Perhaps it’s just as well he went this quickly, as he was suffering, but the speed of it was still shocking. Archie was such a zestful man, so integral a part of Toronto’s musical scene in so many ways and for so long that it’s hard to believe he’s gone. The palpable gap of his absence from Galloway’s event was a strange kind of rehearsal for missing him, something we’ll all have to get used to.

Joan Watson - June 28, 1953 - March 12, 2015