Ollie

A remembrance of Oliver Jones

Oliver Jones has died, at 91, just eleven days past his birthday, which feels about right for a man who never seemed in a hurry to leave a room, a stage, or a life. He went out the way he did everything else at the piano: calmly, on his own time, having already given you more than you expected.

Let me back up, because I want to tell this properly, which is to say sideways, through a memory, before circling back to the facts.

I started at JAZZ.FM91 in 2002. My very first interview, the one that still makes my palms sweat to think about, was with Dick Hyman. Dick just turned 100 this year and word is he’s still playing piano down in Florida, which tells you something about the stamina required in this business, and something about the company Oliver Jones kept without ever seeming to notice he was keeping it. I told Mr. Hyman I’d be sitting down with Oliver the next day, and he said, without any hesitation at all, that he thought Jones was one of the greatest living piano players in the world. When I passed that along to Oliver, he didn’t preen. He didn’t demur either, in that overdone Canadian way. He just smiled. Calmly. That was the whole answer.

In that same first conversation I learned something I hadn’t known, that he and Oscar Peterson were cousins of a sort, both raised on the same Little Burgundy streets, both sent as children to study piano with Oscar’s sister, Daisy Peterson Sweeney. Two of the greatest pianists this country ever produced, coming up under the same teacher, fifteen blocks apart. Montreal in the 1930s and 40s did not make this easy for a Black kid with big hands and bigger ears. Jones used to say his generation’s parents had been porters, and little else was open to them, and that the piano was one of the only doors that swung wide. He walked through it at five years old, doing a novelty act at the Cafe St. Michel, splits and all, playing from underneath the keyboard with a sheet thrown over his hands like a magician’s trick, because that’s what got a Black child a stage in that era. He earned the artistry later. First he had to earn the audience.

He was born Oliver Theophilus Jones, September 11, 1934, to Barbadian parents in Montreal’s Little Burgundy. He toured young with a band called Bandwagon, worked steadily around Montreal and Quebec through the 1950s and into the 60s, and then, like a lot of good musicians, spent years in the pop and variety trenches, arranging, backing singers, doing the unglamorous work that actually builds a musician. He didn’t turn fully to jazz, the thing he loved best, until he was pushing fifty. In 1980 he came home to Montreal to do it right. Within a year he was the resident pianist at Charlie Biddle’s club, Biddles, and in 1983 he cut his first record there, live, which happened to be the very first release on the young Justin Time label that my old pal Jim West runs. That relationship, between the man and the label, lasted the rest of his life.

From there it was the world. Juno Awards in 1986 and 2009. Félix awards. Six honourary doctorates. Officer of the Order of Canada in 1993, a knight of the Ordre national du Québec in ‘94, commander of the Order of Montreal in ‘96. He played the Montreal Jazz Festival every single year from 1981 to 1999, which is not a stat, it’s a marriage. In 1990 the festival gave him the award named for his childhood friend and idol, the Oscar Peterson Award, which must have been a strange and lovely thing to receive.

I knew him as a working critic and radio host knows a great artist, which is to say through his records and through rooms. His album Then and Now, from 2002, was one I played constantly on the air, his own version of “Girl Talk” among the tracks I couldn’t leave alone, Skip Bey on bass beside him, playing something loose and swinging that I still reach for. I caught him live at the Montreal Bistro more than once, and we stayed in touch, the way you do with people who are simply pleasant to be around, no maintenance required.

He was such a likeable man that I decided, somewhere along the way, that he needed a nickname worthy of him. I tried to get people to call him OlliJoe. Nobody bit. He remained Oliver Jones, dignified and unimproved by me, which in hindsight was correct. Some men don’t need the branding. He was already everybody’s favourite uncle, calm, cool, collected, without a trace of entitlement in him despite having every right to some. I remember him telling me once that he was thinking of retiring, and it depressed me for days, genuinely, and then within a few months he was back at the keys as if he’d only stepped out for air. Retirement, for Oliver Jones, was more of a suggestion he made to himself and then politely declined.

The last time I saw him was at Massey Hall, at the Oscar Peterson tribute produced by Oscar’s brilliant daughter, Celine. Sold out, electric, the kind of night this city doesn’t get often enough. Everyone knew Robi Botos would be extraordinary, and he was. But it was Amanda Tosoff who caught the room off guard, playing in a way that, honestly, I don’t think anyone in that hall had seen from her before, a whole new register. Joe Sealy, Thompson Egbo-Egbo, and Laila Biali all took their turns at the piano, and every musician on every instrument that night was working at the absolute top of their game. And still it was Oliver Jones who got the biggest ovation of the evening. He was using a cane by then. He needed help to the bench. And then he sat down, and the cane, the years, all of it fell away, and he became someone else entirely, the way he always did the second his hands found the keys. Massey Hall went completely out of its mind. I’m so glad that’s the memory I get to keep, him at ninety, still able to turn a room like that.

Congrats to Celine for an amazing night of music. Oscar Peterson at 100 Tribute Concert. June 14, 2025 Massey Hall

He died Wednesday in Montreal, his family and Justin Time Records said, calling him “an exceptional musician, a gentle soul and a friend who touched so many lives.” That’s the plain version. The other version is the one I’ve just told you, which is that he was a magic act at five and a miracle at ninety-one, and that in between he never once acted like either.

Rest well, Ollie. Somebody had to say it.

“Hymn To Freedom” Oscar Peterson and Oliver Jones