Ever since my father died, my mother occasionally calls to tell me about the Toronto musicians who used to come to the house to play at my father’s music jams. Back in the 1950s and ’60s Yonge Street in Toronto was lined with jazz and rock clubs, and live music was a big thing. But even then it was tough to get the budget for a big band to have a blow. So Dad took to hosting big band jams in our backyard—he called them “yard jams.”

When I was visiting her this past summer, Mom said, “I don’t think Moe Koffman ever came to the house.” I thought Moe, best known for his hit “Swinging Shepherd Blues” and for appearing on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, had come. So I pulled out some of the old slides taken at the early jams and scanned the rows of musicians assembled on the terrace of our backyard. I couldn’t find Moe. But looking at the pictures brought back a lot more than I was expecting.

The day before a jam we’d take down the folding chairs, hose them off, haul out the bridge table chairs, the kitchen chairs, and still there would not be enough places to sit. Some of the earliest jam pictures taken in our backyard show a Union Jack planted at the top of the little hill we used for tobogganing in winter, a giveaway it was a holiday, probably Dominion Day. We lived in a suburb of mostly middle class families in red brick houses with white trim built after the war in the west end of Toronto. Ours was slightly off the pattern, a yellow brick split-level that the Brady Bunch could have lived in.

A week or two before a jam Dad would announce at the supper table, “I’m going to have a few of the guys over.” He’d get on the phone, call the fellows—only one woman, a singer named Arlene, was in the band—and talk musician stuff: whose charts were legible, who’d been smashed at the last gig, and who’d been busted for playing under scale. The union—Toronto Musicians’ Association—was strong then, so guys who played for the door were reprobates. Leaders who didn’t pay sidemen time and a half after midnight were only slightly less shameful.

One of the musicians, Alehorse, always played for the door. But Al needed the work and was a good story­teller so nobody busted him. There is a photo of him at one of the Dominion Day jams; beside him his wife Mary puffs on a cigarette. Cancer was already growing in her breasts. No one knew then that she’d soon have a double mastectomy and several searing rounds of radiation. She looked like a walking ghost afterward.

But the day of a jam was festive. The guys arrived dressed for a casual gig carrying all manner of musical instruments. Electric keyboards were rare, so the pianist brought a flute. The drummer brought his kit and his newest African or West Indian drum. Sports jackets got cast aside as soon as the band began to play. But the women were ’50s chic to the end. Their spiked heels sank into the lawn, their satin and rayon dresses swished when they walked. These were music widows, women who were mostly alone on Friday and Saturday nights, so they relished the chance to go out.

The husbands were all jazz musicians. Some were members of well-known bands, including The Boss Brass and Lighthouse. One, a sax player named Hart, had played in the opening band for the most famous jazz concert held in Toronto, the legendary night of May 15, 1953, when Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Bud Powell and Max Roach played at Massey Hall. Or very nearly didn’t play because Charlie missed his plane from New York and then once he finally did get to Toronto he kept going AWOL. But somehow, as Hart told it, Charlie miraculously arrived at the Hall at 8:30 p.m., the precise time stipulated in his contract.

Nearly all of them had day jobs, except for Dick, who in his lifelong quest for the “horn” left his “day gig” as an accountant to join show bands in Vegas and on the Sunset Strip in LA. But most stuck it out with various jobs, ranging from repo man for the music store Long & McQuade, to periodontist in Oakville, to vehicle licensing inspector in Mississauga. Several were music teachers, including Bob the clarinetist who was famous in my mind for discovering David Clayton-Thomas before the band Blood, Sweat & Tears did, and possibly in David’s mind for being the hardass at Earl Haig Secondary who sincerely cared for his students’ welfare. My father, Gid, worked as a dentist on Dundas Street until he was in his fifties. He wanted to see us through school before he had the nerve to quit and lead his swing band full-time.

Dad recorded almost every jam, gig and job he played. He used a tabletop magnetic tape machine at first, and later a cassette recorder. All the yard party tapes were stored in the basement, along with tapes from the gigs at the Yonge Street jazz clubs, and from jobs at the dance palaces, the hotels and the golf clubs. So many tapes and cassettes, enough to cover three walls floor to ceiling.

The last yard jam was on June 26, 1978. For three decades afterwards, the jams descended into our basement and only the men came, no wives. I remember the last yard jam for several reasons. Our mother, normally not too interested in these events, had been forced onto centre stage, it being her thirtieth wedding anniversary. So without Mom’s expertise my sister Patricia and I worked the kitchen, where we squared off at knifepoint over a pineapple—should it be cut into chunks or spears? The second trumpet player’s wife, dressed in gauzy Indian cotton and platform sandals, spent the evening staring into my boyfriend’s chest. And Alehorse was missing. He had succumbed to an early death, possibly hastened by an excess of good living. His stylish wife, Mary, was not there either. Not because of the cancer, but because, despite women’s lib, real widows still didn’t attend those sorts of events alone. But mostly I remember the last yard jam because the cops came.

I went with my father to the end of the driveway where the two cops had parked. The light crept slowly down the hill of our street in June. You could see the pinky-orange of the sun setting from where we stood. Dad wanted me with him because he thought that I, being a newly minted lawyer, was experienced with this sort of thing. The older officer shook Dad’s hand, said he really liked hearing “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” as he drove up the street. But one of the neighbours wasn’t enjoying it much, so if the guys would play just one or two more tunes then shut it down, everything would be cool. Especially if one of the songs was Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser.”

After the last of the basement jams, when we’d begun to get used to the idea that Dad was gone and that we would never play all of his reels, tapes and cassettes, Patricia and I bundled them into Dad’s minivan; Dad always owned big vehicles so he could get his stand-up bass and amplifiers into the back. Mom wanted to come with us to the dump, but we convinced her it wasn’t a good idea. We felt terrible throwing away his work, his joy. We were erasing his life, but we didn’t know what else to do. We couldn’t just leave everything at the curb for the garbage truck. It was June again when we stood at the edge of the landfill with the stacks of cartons beside us. The sky was the same pinky-orange as the night of the last yard jam, only even more intense, with a streak of fiery red. For a moment we hesitated, maybe we should keep everything. But what were we going to do with it all? It had to come to an end somehow, so we started dumping.

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