(Panel sits before audience in St. Lawrence Hall's Great Hall. Archie Alleyne speaks into a mic while the other three panelists and the moderator, Eroll Nazareth, listen. Alternates between close ups of Alleyne and wide shot of whole panel.)

[Applause]

Archie Alleyne: Frankly, there was a lot of prejudice here, there was a lot of discrimination. I was one of the first Black musicians to break, infiltrate --

Errol Nazareth: I like that word a lot, say it again.

Archie: –Infiltrate the white establishment.

I was resident drummer at the Town Tavern and at the Colonial Tavern for 13 years. But prior to that there weren't any Black musicians on Yonge Street in any of the clubs. The first musicians to break that barrier was Cy McLean, who's from Nova Scotia. And he went into the Colonial Tavern in 1947, and after that, and up and down Yonge Street, there was a number of clubs starting  from up on Bloor Street all the way down to Queen Street. Lots of clubs, the Zanzibar and all that.

And of course the Blackburns were taking over. That's when the R and B scene started, you know. The jazz scene, it was not easy. I got a lot of. I was called a lot of names other than what my mother named me. There weren't very many. A lot of the community – the Black community – didn't come out to the clubs, because they never felt welcome. It's a shame, but that's the way it went. But there we were.

We had our own clubs within our communities, like Spadina and Dundas. I was born on Queen Street next to the Cameron Hotel in the building that is there. So I know the area quite well, Kensington Market was my playground. I still go down there and my daughters are down there. They live down there still. So, the scene, I did what they called the cross-over. I left the Spadina-Dundas area because I wanted to be a musician and wanted to make my living as a musician, and in order to do that I had to make the cross-over from Spadina and Dundas and go to Bloor and Avenue Road and Bloor, where the after-hours clubs started.

So I started infiltrated the after-hours clubs and all that and kept going. That was part of my schooling, that was how I learned how to play. It wasn't easy at times, but finally. Even with the Toronto Musicians Association, Cy McLean and his band members were the first ones allowed in the Toronto Musicians Association. No Blacks were allowed in the association at that time.

Errol: Wow.

Archie: And what they did was they, was make the fee so high that no one could afford it, or you would have to go through a test of reading music. And most of the musicians -- some of them read and some of them didn't.

Now, I'll give you a little story about the white-blackness. I had a friend of mine, his name was Mort Ross. He was a saxophone player, he was a Jewish fellow. And he said "Arch, there's an ad in the paper here." And this was for a summer engagement. And summer engagements were a great part of a musicians livelihood, because you could go away for a couple of months and work all summer in one of the resorts, you get paid, you eat, you sleep, and you have a good time. And so he said, "this guy wants a drummer and he wants a saxophone player, let's go audition." So, we called the guy up, and we went, we auditioned, and we left and Mort called me about two hours later and said, "Archie, I got the job", he said. "But, he's a little afraid about taking you up to the Muskoka. Because he's afraid about how they're going to accept a Black person up there."

I said, "well, that's okay. I'm going to call the union, and I'm going to report him." So I called the union, Norm Harris was the secretary at the time, and Walter Murdoch was the president, who was pretty well a racist at that time. But I went down, saw Norm Harris, and he called the chap down that had put the ad in the paper, sat us both down, and right away he said "why can't you take Archie up there?" And he said "well, I don't know how they'd accept a Black musician up there." He said, "well, I'll tell you this. If Archie doesn't go, there's no job. Nobody is going. I'm going to cancel it."

So he said, "Archie do you want to go?" And I said, "No" because I just got offered another job, out in Muskoka, a mile away for two months, and this was with Graham Poppy, one of the fine trumpet players in the city, so I think I'll take that job. And that job lasted for three summers, you know.

So that's just one of the incidents that went on.

[Applause]

(Close up of Archie Alleyne speaking. A slideshow archival photos of his band performing. Return to close up of Alleyne. Shots of signs for The Rex Jazz and Blues Bar. Interior of The Rex with scene of people socializing in bar. Exterior of the Rex. Return to Alleyne close up. Shots of band performing. Return to Alleyne close up. Jazz music plays over montage shots of interior of The Rex with shots of Alleyne's band Kollage performing there ending with applause. Fade to black then Fairfield Films logo.)

Transcript

Archie Alleyne: It's not what we play, it's how we play it. We're one of the most energetic bands that we have here in the city. We put a lot of energy into it. We don't sit up there and look at a lot of sheet music staring us in the face. We learn the tunes, and try to do them off the top of our heads. And half the times recording with Dougie, we have to get a clip on microphone because he's all over the place.

And so are the other guys, you don't just stand there like a mannequin. There's a lot of energy put into the band, that's what makes the music so exciting. Thank goodness for the Rex and for Tom and Bob Ross, because they are giving all the young musicians the opportunity to come out and express themselves and to improvise on their instruments.

Dougie came back from LA, he'd been down there for a number years in Chicago, he had to move out of Toronto because there's not enough work for him. But he came back and said "we gotta get a band together, and we gotta get a Black band, because there's not enough around here." They're here, but they're not getting the work.

So, I just kept hunting, I went to Humber College and found some young Black musicians. I went and got...my first pianist was Michael Shan out of York University, who s now with Matt Dusk, he's his musical director now with another chap, Larnell Lewis, who is a fantastic drummer.

So, I just kept looking for Black musicians, bring the band out, and to represent my community, basically because the origins of jazz are in the Black community, so we needed some representatives from that community to play that music. So that's how we started.

Brooke Blackburn: Cy McClean who had a big big band, you know and Archie was I believe was one of the first Black artists allowed to play certain clubs in the city that my father told me about and…and I knew Archie. And…you can't…you could never really really understand how much importance that these people did, you know had for you as a Black musician in Toronto?

Like just because I’d heard so many stories, you know and still hear stories to this day from my father and my friends….or my father's friends that that grew up playing in the city back in the 50s and 60s who, I started playing with them in the 70s, you know, and it was just so…it's such an impact.

So as far as the…the racial aspect of it, they literally opened the doors for us because there was a colour barrier no matter what everybody thinks. There is and there still is a colour barrier, but definitely at that time when they started out. And then I'm sure there was people that opened the doors for them too, you know what I mean?

But Cy and Archie really really opened the doors for many and my father, he played on Yonge Street. And it was hard core. But he had…the black musicians loved playing Yonge Street: the Colonial and the Coq d’Or and certain places on Yonge Street because it's just like when the…when the second world war, when the Black…Black army people came in and the navy…and they all went to Europe they felt like people, you know, and they come back to the United States, and they couldn’t even stay in the same hotel as a white person.

Yet they're fighting with them in the trenches. So it's like that and Toronto was still open much more open than the States, but there was still limitations. Like I say Archie, was the first Black musician at a certain level.