Music Notes

Longtime Scarborough resident Johnny Cowell has led a double life – virtuoso trumpet player with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra as well as an international chart-topper who paved the way for a generation of future Canadian songwriters.

“Primarily I was a trumpet player – that was the main thing – but I got interested in writing songs and it paid off as good or better than the trumpet,” he said from his house in southeast Scarborough, which he has lived in with wife Joan now for 50 years.

The couple have one adult daughter, Marcie (who was educated through the Scarborough public school system going to Bliss Carman and Fairmount public schools and R.H. King high school), and three grandchildren.

His best known hits, which still get played on oldies shows, are arguably:
• Walk Hand in Hand With Me, which was a minor British Invasion hit for Gerry and the Pacemakers in 1965, after being a huge pop hit in 1956 for both Tony Martin and Andy Williams. A big thrill for the couple happened one evening when they were watching the Ed Sullivan Show and, much to their surprise, “Tony Martin came out and sang Hand in Hand,” Cowell said.
• Our Winter Love, which provided Bill Pursell a Top 10 instrumental hit in 1963 (No. 9). In 1967, the Lettermen released a vocal version, which cracked the Top 100 in the U.S.
• and These are the Young Years, which country legend Floyd Cramer turned into an instrumental hit in 1963, and is included in Cramer’s “essential” hits package.

Also interesting to Canadian music fans is that the Guess Who, after their smash debut Shakin’ All Over in 1965, for their second single in 1966 chose the Cowell-penned His Girl, which cracked the Top 20 in England.

Besides these hits, the list of artists who have covered his songs includes Vera Lynn, Chet Atkins, Lawrence Welk, 101 Strings, Nashville Strings and Anita Bryant.

“I stopped writing (pop) songs when Elvis and the Beatles came on the scene, the style itself changed so completely,” he explained. “That’s when I sort of switched over to writing symphonic pops.”

He met with similar success, and has received numerous honours from the many orchestras he’s played with, first and foremost from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra which, on July 18, 1991, in an unprecedented move, presented two special concerts in honour of Cowell, who was featured as trumpet soloist, composer and arranger.

“I enjoyed myself right from the very time I joined the Toronto symphony with Sir Ernest MacMillan ’til I left in 1991.

I think the highlight for me of my Toronto Symphony years was playing in the ‘pops’ concerts. … I was principal trumpet with the pops, and I enjoyed that a lot. I used to look forward to the those concerts.”

Well-known Boston Pops Orchestra conductor Arthur Fieldler, when he was guest conducting in Toronto, used to make sure Cowell was first trumpet.

Cowell recalled one fond memory when Fieldler brought a special arrangement to the Toronto Symphony Pops of Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.

“The opening was a four trumpet standup,” said Cowell, who proceeded to perfectly hum the signature opening bars.

“So we all stood up and played until he stopped us and said: ‘No that doesn’t sound right, just three of you play it.’

“So the fourth guy kind of sat down, and we started again and he stopped us and said: ‘There’s something wrong with that, I don’t like it – so just the first two guys play it.’

“So the fellow and I played it, and then he stopped again (and turned to Cowell, saying): ‘How would you like to do that as a solo?’

“So I wound up playing it as a solo.”

Another highlight occurred when the couple went out to see a Peter Sellers movie Two-Way Stretch. Sellers was playing a character in a prison cell and when he turned on the radio, the song that came on was the Cowell-penned Stroll Along With the Blues.

“Joan and I had no idea it was in there,” said Johnny, adding they went to see the movie simple because “we were both fans of Peter Sellers.”

They then sat through the movie again to hear the song.

Cowell has also been accorded civic honours, awarded Scarborough’s Civic Award of Merit in 1997 and being declared “a favourite son” by Tillsonburg in 1990 in a three-day celebration of his music. Cowell was born and raised in Tillsonburg.

Cowell was honoured yet again on June 9 when a North York-based community orchestra called the Encore Symphonic Concert Band, comprised largely of retired pro and semi-pro musicians, hosted a night of his music in North York.

And they managed quite a coup in enticing the revered 81-year-old Canadian musician to dust off his beloved trumpet for a guest solo.

Although not having played the trumpet for two years, Cowell, in an interview prior to the concert, said he would join in on one of his own compositions, Roller Coaster.

It was commissioned in the late 1960s by the then-artistic director of the Toronto Symphony, Seiji Ozawa.

“We were doing a tour of Japan so he asked me if I would write an encore piece.”

Not only did the TSO perform it, but it also went on to be played by the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and many other orchestras throughout the world.

Another of his favourite orchestral compositions was Canadian Odyssey, which he wrote for the TSO following a 1970 tour by the orchestra of Western Canada and the Northwest Territories.

Amazingly, the June tribute show marked 75 years since he performed his first trumpet solo as a child prodigy back in Tillsonburg.

“I still remember it” he said, chuckling. “My mother played piano. We were invited to play in the Tillsonburg council chamber for the councillors and I stood up on a little stage there and played Abide With Me, with my mother on piano.

“A year later, on my seventh birthday, I was asked to come to London, Ont., and play on a radio show called Sleepy Town Express.”

Having conquered Tillsonburg and London in his pre-teens, Cowell struck out for the big city at 15.

He explained how he grew up listening to a weekly CBC-Radio show by the Toronto Symphony Band on Thursday nights, and then proceeded to learn all the trumpet solos by Ellis McLintock, through sheet music that his father would get for him.

When he found out that McLintock was vacating his spot to serve in the RCAF Central Band in Ottawa, Cowell quickly fired off a resume. “I said that I thought that I was the man for the job. I didn’t tell them that I was 15.”

“And they wrote back and said we’d like to hear you play.”

As soon as he got the reply, about four days after he had sent his original letter, he was on his way to Toronto, hitching a ride with a friend of his father’s on a transport truck, leaving about 4 a.m. and arriving in Toronto about 7 a.m.

Armed with directions from the truck depot, he took the streetcar to the east end where he was knocking at the door of orchestra director Laidlaw Addison before 9 a.m.

“I can’t believe I did this,” said Cowell, chuckling, adding that, “Finally the door opened and it was Laidlaw Addison. He had a nightgown on and I said I’m Jack Cowell – he changed my name to Johnny – and you asked me to come down and audition. I just received this letter four days ago.

“And then he said, ‘How old are you’. And I said 15, but I’ll soon be 16 in four months.

“He said, ‘Well it’s a wasted trip. We can’t even hire you. You’re too young.’”

Cowell said he asked him to come in and was told to warm up while his wife made him coffee. About 20 minutes later, Addison came in the room and asked him to play.

“So I played two of the solos that Ellis McLintock had played on the radio.”

He was then asked to play a hymn, which he also did.

“And he said do you think you could stay overnight and come and audition for the band committee at Varsity Arena in the morning?”

The rest, as they say, is history.

Addison arranged a place for him to stay, the audition was successful, the age problem was worked out with the union and Johnny found himself, at the age of 15, playing on the CBC radio program that he used to listen to. When he turned 16 he was picked up by the Toronto Symphony as an ‘extra,’ but actually got to play a lot.

The following year, he joined a navy band based in Victoria. “I had to get a special letter from my dad to let me join the navy when I was 17 so I could be a soloist with the navy band.”

He would soon also become the principal trumpet with the Victoria symphony.

All of the playing, however, took its toll.

“During VJ-Day (Victory over Japan), we played about three concerts, two parades and then I did an all-night dance job. When I got up in the morning, I couldn’t play a note.”

He went to the doctor and then on to a nerve specialist who determined “that I would never play again because I severed all of the tissues and destroyed the muscles in my lip.”

Undaunted, and back in Toronto, he simply changed directions. “I wrote a piece of music, a suite for symphony orchestras and submitted it to the conservatory (Royal Conservatory of Music) and they gave me a composition scholarship to study composition. And that sort of took up my time.”

At the same time he never gave up hope of playing the trumpet again, “trying all the time to see if I could get a note out of the trumpet.”

Gradually, he did regain his ability, first playing in swing and dance bands.

“I didn’t have any endurance, I didn’t have any range. But I wanted to play so badly,” Cowell said.

“In dance bands you sort of got away with it,” his wife Joan said. “It’s not like a symphony where every note has to be perfect.”

Not only did playing in swing and dance bands help him get his form back, it also helped get him his wife as she was a vocalist in the Stanley St. John dance band, which he also played in.

In 1952, he finally found himself back with the Toronto Symphony.

“It just worked out perfectly for me because there was an opening, I was almost back to where I wanted to be.”

He also had another incentive.

“I said I wasn’t going to marry him until he had a steady job,” said Joan, laughing.

Cowell added: “… So I got a steady job as soon as I could.”

Following his retirement in 1991 with the Toronto Symphony, his talents were scooped up by a number of area concert bands including Toronto Philharmonia and Hannaford Street Silver Band, right up until a few years ago when he put down the trumpet.

There are four songs authored by Johnny Cowell easily available for download on iTunes and they are:

• Walk Hand in Hand With Me (Gerry and the Pacemakers 1965 hit version);
• His Girl (Guess Who 1965 hit version);
• Our Winter Love (two versions, Billy Pursell 1963 instrumental hit; The Letterman vocal hit from 1967)
• These are the Young Years (Floyd Cramer hit from 1963).