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Bert Bailey

Jazz fanatic with various musical and other interests

About Me

Born and raised in Lima, Peru, I later found ways to spend from months to years living in San Francisco, Vancouver Island, Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, London and Barcelona, always alert to whatever music was around.

My mother played Mozart on piano, I'm told better than my father's life-long struggles with Rachmaninoff. Yet I learned that, with another Brit in Montreal, late in the 1940s he played a role in getting Oscar Peterson gigs at that city's Waldorf Astoria Hotel. I gather they also jammed onstage.

They never gave their youngest piano lessons, alas, so I made do with the magical sounds wafting into my world via radio and our Sears Silvertone record player, beginning around the early '60s.

Am now settled in Ottawa, and parlay degrees in philosophy and 13 years in post-Secondary teaching (also humanities, literature, ESL and business English, and Spanish) for work as a consultant policy analyst and communications project manager.

My unwieldy collection of 20th-century classical, rock and jazz (mostly postbop) CDs irks my understanding wife, who knows it to be my perhaps odd but very strong passion. Our three young ones are equally puzzled by all the fuss about my music.

I try to write reviews when gaps in work permit.

Current hope: to make more time for live music.

As for the future, I live in hope that there is one!