The Garden Path b/w Won't You Step Into My Life

Hugh Hagood Hardy was a vibraphonist, pianist and composer whose career ran from modern jazz through television scoring to one of the biggest instrumental hits this country has produced. He was born in Indiana and grew up in Oakville, Ontario, and the music he made carried a Canadian kind of sophistication, cosmopolitan and melodic and never raising its voice.

As a teenager he studied piano with Edna Lawrence and Ellen Scott, then found the vibraphone, an instrument whose warmth and clarity became his signature sound. He read political science and economics at the University of Toronto while taking private composition lessons from Gordon Delamont and spending his nights in the city’s postwar jazz scene. He was a regular at The House of Hambourg, the after-hours club at the centre of Toronto modern jazz, where Phil Nimmons, Moe Koffman and Don Thompson all came up.

From 1957 to 1961 he led his own groups on CBC Radio and in Toronto clubs, then went south to New York. He worked the international circuit there, performing and recording with Gigi Gryce, Herbie Mann, Martin Denny and George Shearing, appearing on several albums with each. He named Shearing as his greatest influence, and the time alongside him sharpened the lyricism that runs through everything Hardy later wrote.

He came home in 1968 after nearly a decade away and founded Hagood Hardy Productions, which quickly became a steady source of music for advertising and film. His jingles for Kellogg’s, General Motors, London Life and Canadian Pacific grew as familiar to Canadians as the programs they interrupted. The commercial work never pushed the jazz aside. He put together a trio with bassist Ian Henstridge and drummer Ricky Marcus, and it grew into The Montage with vocalists Stephanie Taylor and Lynne McNeil, a soft jazz-pop group that caught the polish of Canadian studio music at the end of the 1960s.

In 1970 Hardy and The Montage made one of the most sought-after Canadian albums of the era, Hagood Hardy & The Montage (CBC Radio Canada LM-81). It was pressed in tiny numbers for internal CBC use, never sold to the public, and now sits among the rarest Canadian LPs, a grail record for collectors of soft rock and Latin jazz. They cut it at CBC Studio G in Toronto on August 10 and 11, 1970, with Dave Bird and Jack Budgell producing. It holds versions of “Scarborough Fair”, “Nica’s Dream” and Barbara Moore’s “Hideaway”, along with two Doug Riley originals, “Travelling Down to Make It Town” and “You”. Hardy’s vibes move over the grooves of Gary White on bass and Dave Lewis on drums, with Taylor and McNeil doubling the vocal lines above them. The whole record is light on its feet and rhythmically inventive, a Canadian take on the California soft-jazz sound years before that style found an audience.

A commercial follow-up, Montage (GRT 9230-1012, 1972), widened the group with guitarist Bill Bridges and bassist Rick Homme and put Hardy’s arrangements in front of a larger audience. Its readings of “Baby I’m a Want You”, “How Insensitive” and “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” make it one of the finest Canadian lounge-jazz records of the early 1970s.

In 1975 he took a jingle he had written for Salada Tea and turned it into a single. “The Homecoming”, released on his own Isis Records, reached No. 14 in Canada and became an international hit. It won him Junos for Composer and Instrumental Artist of the Year along with Billboard’s Instrumental Artist of the Year, and the album of the same name went double platinum in Canada. His name became synonymous with sophisticated instrumental pop, a field often written off as easy listening, though in his hands the restraint was the craft.

He wrote for film and television right through the 1970s and 1980s: Second Wind (1975), Rituals (1976), Klondike Fever (1980) and a long run of CBC television movies. The high point came with Anne of Green Gables (1985) and its sequel, which brought him a Gemini for Best Score in 1986. “Anne’s Theme” remains one of the most recognized instrumental melodies in Canadian television.

By the end of the 1980s he had circled back to jazz with Morocco (Sackville CD 2-2018, 1989), a warm acoustic session with Michael Stuart, Terry Lukiski, Mark Crawford, Richard Homme and Barry Elmes, and pianist Gary Williamson as guest. It put him back inside the post-bop tradition he had learned at the House of Hambourg nearly forty years earlier.

Hardy released more than eighteen albums and sold over half a million records in Canada, and he put the standing that came with it to work. He sat on the board of the SOCAN Foundation, served as honorary chairman of the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and as a UNICEF ambassador, and ran as a Liberal candidate in 1995. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 1992 and received the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. After his death in 1997, SOCAN renamed its annual Jazz/Instrumental Music Award in his honour.

His records still find listeners at both ends of his career, from the CBC LM-81 Montage that collectors trade stories about to “The Homecoming”, which a whole generation of Canadians can still hum from memory. Hardy wrote melodies that sound effortless and are anything but, and that gift held steady across four decades of jazz clubs, ad agencies, film sets and concert halls.

-Robert Williston