Reflections on Vancouver, British Columbia and other topics, related or not
Lionel “Mitch” Mitchell
An early Vancouver jazz talent
The tenor saxophonist played with Count Basie, according to an April 10, 1964, jazz column in the Vancouver Province; with Jimmie Lunceford, according to a July 19, 1952, Vancouver Sun feature entitled Negroes Live Next Door; and/or with Duke Ellington, according to what I remember from my parents, who were friends of Mitch.
He was possibly Vancouver’s first homegrown jazz musician of significant stature, except he likely wasn’t quite homegrown. He probably spent at least part of his childhood on the Sunshine Coast.
Nevertheless the childhood was musical. Here’s an excerpt from Mark Miller’s definitive 1997 book Such Melodious Racket: The Lost History of Jazz in Canada 1914-1949:
There were four brothers in the Mitchell family, Stan—the eldest—Elliott, Lionel and Les. Their father, Greenwood Mitchell, a logging engineer, had arrived in Vancouver as a travelling musician from Montgomery, Alabama, via Chicago; mindful of his sons’ limited prospects in British Columbia outside of logging and, of course, the railroad, he encouraged their interest in music, providing instruments and some semblance of instruction.
With Coleman Hawkins as a strong early influence, Lionel stood out among his siblings. As Les told Miller:
Either you’re a musician or not, and he was. It seemed like it was no effort for him to sit down and practise for hours. He couldn’t get enough of it.
After gigging around Vancouver and a few other B.C. locations, Miller relates, Mitch joined Ollie Wagner’s Knights of Harlem in 1935 at age 18. He worked in Seattle, Portland and Edmonton by 1940, when he fronted his own band at the Log Cabin Inn, a black cabaret that the following year advertised a “colored floor show” with Southern fried chicken and hot biscuits included in the $1.05 cover charge.
A couple of newspaper ads from 1940 and 1964.
The 544 Main Street address (later the New Delhi Cabaret) placed the club near Hogan’s Alley, a now-demolished neighbourhood that hosted Vancouver’s largest concentration of black residents and some notorious nightspots, spawning anecdotes that must be heard to be disbelieved.
Circa 1942 Mitch joined the U.S. Army, serving as a band musician, Miller notes. (Wayde Compton has attributed the southward migration of Vancouver blacks to a small local black population that provided few eligible same-race spouses at a time when society discouraged cross-racial relationships.) Mitch’s big-name big band touring must have followed the war.
The cover photo of Miller’s book, also reproduced inside, shows Mitch as a sharp-looking young dude with Tiger Ace Bailey and his Knights of Swing.
Back in Vancouver Mitch led or worked in small combos, sometimes with pianist/organist Mike Taylor, a Californian transplant who was a mainstay of Vancouver jazz at least into the ’70s.
Besides Miller’s account, Mitch got brief recognition in Marian Jago’s book Live at the Cellar and was apparently remembered by those familiar with Hogan’s Alley.
Mitch died in the 1960s, according to Miller. I think it was the late ’60s or early ’70s, with the cause possibly related to a brain tumour. His last employment, as far as I know, was as a West End apartment building manager.
I’m not aware of recordings by any of the Mitchells. It was by no means unusual that outstanding musicians of the period weren’t recorded.
So ended a remarkable life, recounted here in only the briefest outline. Mitch was a (formally) unschooled musician of considerable achievement who carried on a black American tradition in a largely white Canadian city. Yet he ended up in obscurity as popular music that had often been jazz-related turned away from sophisticated melody and harmony, away from instruments other than guitar, and away from music itself to replace it with image, expressed mostly through appearance, demeanour and behaviour.
Miller’s book provides much more info about Mitch. Both Miller’s and Jago’s books offer highly informative and readable accounts of Canadian musical and social history.
