SOURCE: ALL ABOUT JAZZ PUBLICITY, Published: 2013-01-08
Obit by James Hale, courtesy of Jazz Chronicles and CBC Music: Note: My longtime friend Jacques Emond, former programming director for the Ottawa International Jazz Festival, died Sunday night after suffering a stroke the previous day.
Almost everywhere I've ventured in the global jazz community I've found them: obsessed, lifelong fans of the music with encyclopedic knowledge, massive collections of recordings, and a thousand stories—either firsthand or many times retold. Some, like broadcaster Phil Schaap, have turned their obsessions into high-profile careers; most you've never heard of.
What separated Jacques Emond from almost all the other jazz savants—public and private—I've met is that he never flaunted his knowledge, never made anyone feel that he possessed something someone else lacked. If he could share his enthusiasm for something he'd heard or some new artist he'd discovered, he was happy. His love of the music was absolutely selfless.
A short, shy, career public servant, Jacques never stood out in a crowd.
Maybe that's the reason the guys from Duke Ellington's band—road-hardened lifers like Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney—felt comfortable hanging with Jacques when the group swung through West Quebec. His easygoing persona permitted him to blend in, even though, as a non-drinking, francophone, government worker he was as far removed from musicians like Hodges and Carney as possible.
That low-key demeanor didn't make him an obvious choice when Joe Reilly, then the executive director of the Ottawa International Jazz Festival, Don Lahey, Joe's predecessor, and me, then the president of the festival's board of directors, met to determine who we could approach to introduce acts from the stage in 1988. We needed a bilingual person, and we knew Jacques as a festival volunteer and as the host of a big band-oriented program on CKCU-FM, where we also volunteered.
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