Remembering the International City of Jazz

What We Choose To Remember

What Montrealer has not enjoyed a summer’s day at the Montreal International Jazz Festival? Over the years, we came to take for granted the throngs of people of all ages and backgrounds happily enjoying the music and the street performances, some scripted and others purely spontaneous. We recalled how extraordinary it was through the eyes of out-of-town visitors marvelling that so much was freely available to so many.

Montreal’s jazz festival was a reflection of its co-founder, Alain Simard. During the 2024 edition of the festival Simard, now retired, launched a book about his dream to create a festival that became one of the biggest and most popular in the world.

Full disclosure, I worked with Alain Simard and the festival for several years, interviewing artists for televised concert broadcasts. The Gatsby-era solid oak desk in my office belonged to Alain when he founded the jazz festival in 1980.

Simard’s book Je rêvais d’un festival is the story of a young man discovering culture, politics, the music business and entrepreneurial skills that would enable him to create Montreal’s International Jazz Festival. The book is also a fascinating encapsulation of contemporary Quebec history.

Je rêvais d’un festival (I dreamed of a festival) Alain Simard, Les Éditions La Presse (2024)

Born in 1950 in Villeray, not far from Michel Tremblay’s Plateau, Simard experienced the end of the Duplessis era, now remembered as La Grande Noirceur (the Great Darkness). It is difficult in today’s militantly secular society to imagine that Quebec was so recently deeply religious. Simard’s family was no exception, in the faith of his youth or the subsequent embrace of secularism.

The 1960s in Quebec were an explosively exciting march to modernity: the metro system, towering steel and glass skyscrapers, Expo ’67, demolishing acres of inner-city slums, creating a Church-independent education system, CEGEPs and a network of Université du Québec campuses.

The 60s were also the era of a more violent program of modernization with le Front de liberation du Québec (FLQ). The young Alain Simard had a summer job at Eaton’s, infamous for refusing to serve customers in French, where he discovered that francophone employees were not permitted to speak to one another in their mother tongue. Simard’s girlfriend, who worked for an airline, also discovered that her unilingual Anglo bosses refused to allow Francophone employees to engage in private conversations in a language the bosses could not understand or monitor.

I found the book’s chapters on the FLQ and the rise of Quebec’s separatist movement particularly interesting. Simard was stopped and questioned twice by police during the October Crisis, under the exceptional powers of the War Measures Act, simply for being a leading figure in the underground music scene. His sister was clubbed by police during Lundi de la Matraque. Simard’s family was a microcosm of the divided society that held two referendums on independence and twice voted to remain in Canada. His father was a militant indépendantiste and friend of René Lévesque, and his mother a discreet federalist whose letters-to-the-editor in support of Pierre Trudeau, written under various pseudonyms, were discovered only after her death.

Like many Québécois of his generation Simard made a pilgrimage to Vancouver in the 60s where he practiced his English and discovered the kids in BC were more liberated than his religiously repressed peers back home. Simard was profoundly influenced by Expo ’67, which flooded Montreal with modern ideas, global culture and visitors from around the world. The jazz festival he created in 1980 would hold its first edition on Île Ste-Hélène, on stages built for Expo, before migrating to St-Denis Street, where the festival encountered severe opposition from the mayor of Montreal. Jean Drapeau was the father of modernity in the 60s and 70s but Drapeau was also the politician who built his career on cleaning up vice associated with jazz clubs that flourished during the years of American prohibition. Drapeau was adamantly opposed to the rebirth of jazz in Montreal and ordered city workers to remove the festival’s first street stage during the middle of the night.

Alain Simard’s book is a fascinating account of culture and politics in modern Quebec. His passions are complex. He wanted Montreal to be proudly French but his city also included Oscar Peterson and Leonard Cohen. Simard wanted his festival to be an international showcase for the most talented musicians on the planet and for fans from around the world. Simard’s vision is broad, generous, ambitious and as welcoming as the festival he created. Je rêvais d’un festival is a celebration of things that make us proud of our city and happy to call it home.

Guy Rex Rodgers was founding Executive Director of the English Language Arts Network (ELAN) and recently returned to filmmaking. You can reach Guy at: [email protected]