SECOND WIND
She Kept Singing - My story about Canada's Sweetheart of Swing, Alex Pangman!
Stories and photos of a great talent and great friend: Alex Pangman!
Alex Pangman photo by Vincent Lions - she’s at Old Mill Toronto Friday May 22 at 8pm.
There are people you meet and people who happen to you. Alex Pangman happened to me, and I count it among my better fortunes.
She walked into the room and I thought: wrong decade. Everything about her belonged somewhere between 1933 and forever. I half expected to check my watch and find it running backwards. She learned jazz sitting on her grandfather’s knee, a song called “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue,” and she took it from there with the kind of commitment that doesn’t ask permission.
I introduced myself with uncharacteristic shyness. This is not my mode. But there it was.
Her boyfriend at the time was blind and played Scrabble in braille, which I found magnificent. I went to their house and found it altogether civilized. When they eventually parted ways I migrated to the family home, where her father was the quiet, decent kind of man you want more of, and her mother was warm and funny in the way that reminds you your own mother was once in her younger years.
Alex mentioned she had a horse. I mentioned I rode. This is how friendships deepen.
I went to more concerts than I can count. I featured her in any concert I could, booked her around town with wild abandon, got Bucky Pizzarelli, then an octogenarian, to play on her album. She collaborated with Ron Sexsmith. She led her Alleycats through the standards like she invented the form. Dan Barrett called her Canada’s Sweetheart of Swing, which is not a title you get by playing it safe. You get it by digging into the 78-rpm crates, doing what she calls musical archaeology, resurrecting the lesser-known songs of the hot jazz era and reintroducing them to people who didn’t know they were missing them.
Then one night on a jazz crawl, two dozen of us moving through the Distillery District like a minor cultural migration, I spotted something worth noting. Down on the ground floor, looking up at Alex on the balcony, was a face. Handsome in the useful way, not the ornamental way. He was smiling with his whole self. I recognized the expression. It was the same one I’d had the first time.
I went up to the balcony and told her: there’s a very cute man down there who appears to be enchanted by you. Oh, she said. That’s Tom. It’s our first date.
Months later I was at their wedding. Tom Parker is, as advertised, a catch. She invited me to ride his horse Beaumont. I hesitated; “I’m not sure if it’s correct for me to ride another mans horse”. Alex considered this with the patience she reserves for mild absurdity and said, “Do you own a horse? Then you have always ridden another man’s horse”. I had no rebuttal. Alex rides her horse Gypsy. We hit the racetrack once at Woodbine (with Melody Gardot in tow!), but most of our horse adventures involve riding, not betting.
I had known Alex for several months before I understood she had cystic fibrosis. Born with it, in Mississauga, in 1976. Most people with CF don’t reach their late twenties. Alex was already past that. Smoke-filled venues were not exactly the ideal environment for someone battling lung disease, and she reluctantly slowed down to recoup. But she kept singing. That’s the thing about her. She kept singing even when the air itself was the enemy.
By late 2008, she was in a devastatingly fragile state, down to 27 percent of her lung capacity, requiring an oxygen tank for simple tasks like getting dressed and walking her dog. She waited six months on the transplant list, and on November 4, 2008, a donor came through just in time. She went into the operating room and reportedly told the surgical team: I’m a singer, so let’s hope the intubation goes well. That’s either the bravest thing anyone has ever said or the funniest. Probably both.
She came roaring back with 33, a gorgeous record whose title refers both to her age at recording and to the songs that were popular in 1933. It was a statement.
Then the body did what bodies sometimes do. In the summer of 2013, while experiencing organ rejection, she opened for Willie Nelson at Massey Hall, singing in pieces, phrase by phrase, stealing little pockets of air between notes. Six weeks later the call came again. A second double-lung transplant. Another donor found.
When she came to the radio station in those uncertain days, I met her in the parking lot. I hugged her and started crying. I tried to be collected. She noticed, as she notices everything, and cried with me. I told her I loved her and would do anything to help. I knew as I said it that I had no particular tools for the job. I’m not a surgeon, not a rich man. But sometimes love is the declaration and not the instrument.
Tom told me he was holding himself together on the outside. I told him I was nervous too. I said, with complete sincerity, that the world needed people like Alex Pangman in it. This is not the sort of thing I say. I meant it absolutely. The second set of lungs took. She is still here.
What does a singer do with a second set of gifted lungs? She flew to New Orleans, walked into a studio, and cut New, a Juno-nominated album that announced, without any ambiguity, that she was back and then some. She has sung at Princess Margaret Hospital. She has raised money for Jazz FM 91. She hosts Swing Set on JAZZ.FM91 on Saturday evenings. She has campaigned tirelessly for the Ontario Lung Association, and convinced what must be hundreds of people to sign their organ donor cards, because she is alive today only because strangers, in their final hours, remained generous.
I signed mine. I passed her story on to everyone I know. www.beadonor.ca
Here is what I want you to understand. Every note Alex Pangman sings is borrowed air. It belongs to people who said yes on a form, who made a decision that cost them nothing and gave her everything. She knows this. She talks about it constantly, because not all of her friends who were waiting for a transplant made it. They didn’t get lungs in time.
She is turning fifty soon. She is still recording. She is still performing. She still walks into a room and collapses the distance between now and then. For someone the actuarial tables wrote off thirty years ago, she has lived with a kind of amplitude that embarrasses the rest of us.
I have been an atheist my entire adult life. I hold that position with reasonable confidence. Alex Pangman makes it difficult. Miracle girl!
So when she steps to the microphone in a warm room and opens up on a Lee Wiley tune from 1933, it isn’t just jazz. It’s the whole argument for being alive, made in real time, with four-four swing and a smile that could light up any ballroom.
Go see her at Old Mill Toronto Friday May 22, or an outdoor show this summer. Bring someone who doesn’t think they like jazz. You can fix that in one set.
