It wasn't the first time that Phil Nimmons has been honoured for his contribution to jazz as a teacher, composer and bandleader. It surely won't be the last. On this occasion -- at Humber College on Toronto's western waterfront in April -- two student orchestras presented a concert of compositions that Nimmons had written during the 1960s and '70s for his big band at the time, Nimmons 'n' Nine plus Six, including his masterwork from 1974, The Atlantic Suite.
Many a musician honoured in this manner would have listened patiently from the audience as Humber's young men and women tackled the complexities of music that once challenged some of the finest jazz and studio players on the Toronto scene. Nimmons, however, took his place on-stage. In a tableau that demonstrated clearly why no jazz musician in Canada is regarded with greater affection, he sat at the end of the reed sections of the school's "A" and "B" bands alongside five saxophonists nearly 60 years his junior.
He played through his old arrangements once again and took his clarinet solos in the very same spots that he had set aside for himself with Nimmons 'n' Nine plus Six back when. Between tunes he joshed with the kids around him -- he seemed to know every one of them by name -- and after each of their solos he led the audience in applauding their efforts.
Once a teacher, always a teacher; on this night, the lesson was humility. The Dean of Canadian Jazz -- as the program for the Humber College tribute described him -- sits in a west-end Toronto coffee shop and ponders his career in education and in music more generally. The school year is now over at the University of Toronto, where Nimmons has taught since 1973. He has done a couple of high-school clinics in recent days, one on this very afternoon at Toronto's Bloor Collegiate with a student band visiting from Winnipeg's Collège Beliveau.
Looking ahead, he has a week's work with his quartet at the Montreal Bistro in Toronto, coinciding with the release by Sackville Records of a double CD, Sands of Time. All this, and he'll turn 78 the day after the Bistro engagement concludes.
Nimmons calls himself a "people person" as he begins to pull a cranberry muffin apart. He harks back immediately to the example set by his parents.
First, his father, a dentist in Kamloops, B.C., where Nimmons was born, and later in Vancouver: "I remember my dad had one of those plaques that was supposed to look like parchment up on the wall of his office. I don't recall it word for word, but it was something like: 'It behooves the best of us to know the best of somebody else.' "
Then, his mother: "It was a natural thing for me to get involved in teaching and meeting people. My mother -- I think I've got this side of her character -- always seemed to relate to all age levels, even the very young."
Not that Nimmons was a born educator. He had already been active for 20 years as a clarinetist and composer -- first in Vancouver and then, as of 1950, in Toronto -- before he showed any inclination to teach. He took his first steps in that direction as a co-founder with Oscar Peterson and others of the Advanced School of Contemporary Music, which flourished in Toronto from 1960 to 1963.
At the time, he was nearing the end of a period in which he wrote incidental music for CBC radio and TV. His jazz band, Nimmons 'n' Nine, was simply for kicks, although it did make two LPs for Verve in the 1950s (recently reissued together on CD as The Canadian Scene via the Phil Nimmons Group). After expanding the band by six musicians in 1965, and agreeing to a busy schedule of CBC broadcasts with it, Nimmons began to find his way around the corridors of the school system.
"We were looking for a live audience," he explains now. "We were studio musicians who usually played for a microphone. So, that's why we went into the schools. At first we would just go and do the broadcast; we rehearsed back in the studio. That evolved into the band rehearsing for the broadcast in the school auditorium and then, if the school had a stage band, the students would come and sit beside members of Nimmons 'n' Nine Plus Six and just have a ball."
It has always been important to Nimmons that the kids should have fun. "Dealing with the younger people," he suggests, "is a loving challenge, because you want to find a way to communicate with them and to keep that communication happening, which means trying to find ways of being at their level."
(Here's Nimmons describing to a female Collège Beliveau saxophonist the sort of nonchalance he wanted to hear in a musical exchange with one of the band's male trumpeters: "He's trying to get a date, and you're playing hard to get.")
It's a philosophy that has served him well over the years at any number of universities, stage band competitions and summer jazz camps around the country -- from Courtenay, B.C., to Fredericton. Along the way, he has touched the lives of several generations of Canada's leading jazz lights.
(A case in point: He'll share the stage with Diana Krall, Renée Rosnes, Carol Welsman and others next Tuesday in Toronto at the Royal York Hotel's Concert Hall in an evening presented by the Royal Conservatory of Music to honour Oscar Peterson; Nimmons crossed paths as a teacher or an adjudicator with all three women at some early point in their careers.)
His work in the field brought him a place in the U.S.-based International Association of Jazz Educators's hall of fame in January. If there's something summational about such an honour, though, be it known that Nimmons himself hasn't finished yet. At an age when many of his contemporaries have moved on to what he calls "the Land of 2 and 4" -- that's jazz musician's whimsical notion of the hereafter, one where everything swings -- he has at least one challenge left: the clarinet.
"I have this feeling that I haven't played it the way I want to yet," he says, "I haven't done with it what I want to do." Sands of Time is his first new recording since the final Nimmons 'n' Nine plus Six session in 1979 and his first to date in a quartet setting. The clarinet's awfully exposed and the clarinetist knows it.
Nimmons is playing his own tunes, pieces dating from 1958 through 1999, and he's in the familiar and sympathetic company of pianist Gary Williamson, bassist Steve Wallace and drummer Barry Elmes. Still, he seems uncertain.
"I get very enthusiastic at times, and I get carried away," he admits. "I have a tendency when I go out to play -- because I play so infrequently, relatively speaking -- to try to play everything I ever learned in the last 70 years."
(If he's not so sure about his clarinet work, one young Collège Beliveau saxophonist most definitely is. When she revealed herself to be a clarinetist in the school's concert band back in Winnipeg, Nimmons offered an impromptu clinic on the instrument, demonstrating glissandos and blowing a sweet, unaccompanied Summertime. "I've never heard the clarinet sound so nice," the student told one of her bandmates afterwards, eyes widening. "And he gave me a box of reeds!")
"Sometimes I have nights when I think I'm really swinging," Nimmons muses, "the way Zoot Sims used to swing. And I dig that. Other nights, I'm all over the place. And I dig that, too. But it's so different. Maybe I should stop saying: 'This is the way I play best.' Maybe I should just play, and whatever comes out, comes out."
Playing the clarinet is tough enough without all of this second-guessing.
"We shall see," he concludes, as ever humble. "I've got maybe a few more years -- before I go to the Land of 2 and 4 -- to find out what I can achieve with it."
The Phil Nimmons Quartet performs at the Montreal Bistro in Toronto from May 29 to June 2.