Seventy-eight years ago, Canada’s top big band musician began a residency in the Spanish Ballroom of the
at Granville and Georgia.
It was a homecoming for
, a Kerrisdale kid who was coming from a triumphant gig at the Imperial Ballroom in the
in Toronto.
Born in Toronto in 1910, Kenney moved to Vancouver at age two and fell in love with big band music in his teens listening to American radio broadcasts. He made money for music lessons by delivering papers for the Daily Province and, at 18, turned pro as the saxophone and clarinet player in the CJOR Radio Orchestra.
Within a short time he was recruited for Len Chamberlain’s Orchestra at the Hotel Vancouver, where he made $50 a week. He doubled his dough by giving saxophone lessons during the day.
“I was on top of the world,” he told Province reporter Roy Shields in 1974. “It was fabulous, money was coming out of my ears.”
In 1929, he moved to Regina to become a travelling musical instrument salesman. But the Depression hit and the bottom soon fell out of sales.
In 1930, he was in Carlyle, Sask., hoping to sell some instruments to a band from Minnesota. The American band failed to show up for their gig, so Kenney put together a group to replace them, and his career as a bandleader was launched.
Back in Vancouver in 1931, he formed a house band at the Alexandra Ballroom at Robson and Hornby (where Robson Square is today). Soon Kenney was touring around B.C. and Alberta, pulling in the masses with a sweet sound popular with dancers.
“It was a good era for great dance tunes,” Kenney told the Sun’s Brian Kieran in 1983. “The talkies were just coming in and there were lots of musicals starring people like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Sometimes one of these movies would have six or seven real hits which people wanted to hear.”
His band was dubbed the Western Gentlemen in 1934 when Kenney secured a radio gig on the
Canadian Radio Commission network
, a precursor to the CBC.
The show was recorded in
in Alberta, where Kenney played during the summers, and was called Rocky Mountain Melody Time. The theme song of the show, and his band, became a waltz, The West, a Nest, and You.
Kenney later had a Sunday night show called Sweet and Low recorded at the Hotel Vancouver, and in 1937, ventured east to broadcast from the Royal York in Toronto.
“He recognized the value of radio early, and as a result of that he had a national name when nobody else did,” said another Canadian big band legend, the late
.
“He was travelling across the Prairies in the Dirty ’30s, 10 cents a dance stuff in ballrooms at resorts like Waterton Lakes in Alberta and the Trianon Ballroom in Regina. He played them all, right back to Halifax, and he could do that because his name went ahead of him with his radio broadcasts.”
He made his first 78 in 1938 for RCA Victor in Montreal, and became so successful he had his own Pullman rail car to travel from city to city. Two weeks into his 1938 gig at the Spanish Grill, he did a broadcast that was carried on the BBC in Britain and on the NBC radio network in the U.S.
In 1940 he moved to Toronto, and Dal Richards took over Kenney’s house gig at the new Hotel Vancouver’s Panorama Roof. Richards would stay at the Panorama Roof for 25 years, while Kenney kept up his touring. During the Second World War, he entertained an estimated 400,000 troops in coast-to-coast tours that totalled 75,000 miles.
In 1946, he bought land at Woodbridge near Toronto and set up Mart Kenney’s Ranch, his own dance hall. Though rock ‘n’ roll displaced his style of music on the radio and charts, he continued to tour and play at his venue into the 1960s.
In 1969, he moved to Mission, where he sold real estate and played the odd gig. He died there on Feb. 8, 2006, a month shy of his 96th birthday.
Mart Kenney with his mother on Sept. 13, 1950.
Kenney on Aug. 13, 1980.
