ARPIN o@ca.on.grey_county.owen_sound.the_sun_times 2007-11-12 published
ARPIN,
John▼
Francis▼
Oscar▼
Died peacefully on November 8, 2007 at the age of 70, with his
loving wife and family at his side. John was born in Port McNicoll,
Ontario on December 3, 1936. He was an internationally acclaimed
pianist, composer, arranger and performed in a variety of settings
including upscale clubs and concert halls both as a soloist or
with symphonies. He also produced and wrote music for several
television series, including TVO's Polka Dot Door. John brought
joy to many through his gift of music, his passion for and engagement
in life and through his charm and wit. He will be forever missed
by his wife, Mary Jane Esplen and his children - son, Bob and
his wife Lynne;▼ daughter Jennifer and her husband Steve
SCHAEFER
and daughter Nadine and her husband Majid
MOHAMMADI, all of Toronto.
John also leaves 4 grandchildren - grand_sons Alexander and Kurt
and granddaughters Nicole and Brianna. John is also survived
by his brother, Leo of Midland, Ontario. John was predeceased
by his mother, Marie Emelda
BERTRAND and father, Elie Regis
ARPIN.
John and his family greatly appreciate the excellent care provided
by the Temmy Latner Centre for Palliative Care, and treatments
at Princess Margaret and Mount Sinai Hospitals, as well as services
organized by Toronto's Community Care Access Centre (e.g. St. Elizabeth's
Nurses). The family will receive Friends at the Humphrey Funeral
Home - A.W. Miles Chapel, 1403 Bayview Avenue (south of Eglinton
Avenue East), 1-800-616-3311, from 2-4 and 6-9 p.m. Thursday, November 15 and
Friday, November 16. A Prayer Service will be held on Friday
evening at 7: 30 in the chapel. Mass of Christian Burial will
be held in Saint Michael's Cathedral, 65 Bond Street, Toronto on
Saturday, November 17 at 10: 00 a.m. If desired, donations in
John's memory may be made to the Saint Michael's Choir School,
67 Bond Street, Toronto M5B 1X5, 416-393-5518, The Canadian Association
of Psychosocial Oncology, 269 Jarvis Street, Unit 7, Toronto
M5B 2C5, www.capo.ca. Condolences and memories may be forwarded
through www.humphreymiles.com.
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ARPIN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-11-12 published
ARPIN,
John▲▼
Francis▲▼
Oscar▲▼
Died peacefully on November 8, 2007 at the age of 70, with his
loving wife and family at his side. John was born in Port McNicoll,
Ontario on December 3, 1936. He was an internationally acclaimed
pianist, composer, arranger and performed in a variety of settings
including upscale clubs and concert halls both as a soloist or
with symphonies. He also produced and wrote music for several
television series, including TVO's Polka Dot Door. John brought
joy to many through his gift of music, his passion for and engagement
in life and through his charm and wit. He will be forever missed
by his wife, Mary Jane
ESPLEN and his children - son, Bob and
his wife Lynne;▲ daughter Jennifer and her husband Steve
SCHAEFER
and daughter Nadine and her husband Majid
MOHAMMADI, all of Toronto.
John also leaves 4 grandchildren - grand_sons Alexander and Kurt
and granddaughters Nicole and Brianna. John is also survived
by his brother, Leo of Midland, Ontario. John was predeceased
by his mother, Marie Emelda
BERTRAND and father, Elie Regis
ARPIN.
John and his family greatly appreciate the excellent care provided
by the Temmy Latner Centre for Palliative Care, and treatments
at Princess Margaret and Mount Sinai Hospitals, as well as services
organized by Toronto's Community Care Access Centre (e.g. St. Elizabeth's
Nurses). The family will receive Friends at the Humphrey Funeral
Home - A.W. Miles Chapel, 1403 Bayview Avenue (south of Eglinton
Avenue East) from 2-4 and 6-9 p.m. Thursday, November 15 and Friday,
November 16. A Prayer Service will be held on Friday evening
at 7: 30 in the chapel. Mass of Christian Burial will be held
in Saint Michael's Cathedral, 65 Bond Street on Saturday, November 17
at 10: 00 a.m. If desired, donations in John's memory may be made
to the Saint Michael's Choir School, 67 Bond Street, Toronto M5B 1X5,
416-393-5518, The Canadian Association of Psychosocial Oncology,
269 Jarvis Street, Unit 7, Toronto M5B 2C5, www.capo.ca. Condolences
and memories may be forwarded through. www.humphreymiles.com
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ARPIN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-11-17 published
Pianist was the 'Chopin of Ragtime' and a master of all musical
genres
As a composer, his music was heard on Polka Dot Door as well
as daily on Morningside. As a performer, he made more than 60
albums. 'He was one of those naturals'
By Lisa FITTERMAN,
Special to The Globe and Mail, Page S11
By all rights and the laws of human physiology, John
ARPIN should
never have been a pianist. His hands seemed too small, with short,
delicate fingers that somehow spanned not only octaves but whole
musical genres, from classical and opera to Broadway, the Beatles
and ragtime.
Couple those hands with an encyclopedic general knowledge of
music, add the gift of the gab, and you had a consummate entertainer
who, over the course of half a century, released no less than
67 recordings and often engaged his audiences in impromptu history
lessons about what he would play.
"You really felt you were part of a John Arpin performance, rather
than just an observer," said Howard
CABLE, who gave the pianist
one of his earliest professional gigs back in 1956 as part of
a band playing at the General Motors show at the Canadian National
Exhibition in Toronto.
"I hired him as a sub but soon realized that I'd better keep
him on full-time because he was terrific," Mr.
CABLE recalled.
"He may have been young but he was confident beyond his years.
I don't know how he was so confident. I remember asking him where
he was from. When he said 'Port McNicoll,' well, I said that
I didn't think anyone came from there. But he was one of those
naturals, I guess, destined to become a star."
Georgian Bay Boyhood
John ARPIN grew up in Port McNicoll, Ontario, where he was the
second of Elie and Marie
ARPIN's two sons. His parents ran a
general store in the little Georgian Bay town that was once known
as "the Chicago of Canada" for its shipping and grain-handling
facilities, and instilled in their children both their devout
Catholic faith (his mother attended church every day) and their
love of music.
Mr. ARPIN often spoke of a gift his parents gave him for Christmas
when he was a teenager: a recording of a Puccini opera. At first,
he looked on the gift askance. Opera? For him? To make his parents
happy, or at least keep them at bay, he played it. It wasn't
half-finished before he was crying like a baby and asking for
more.
His introduction to piano was through his brother, Leo, who was
10 years older and started to take lessons when his sibling was
still a toddler. As Leo banged out chords and scales, little
John mimicked the sounds. Soon, he was picking out tunes, displaying
an innate musicality, a perfect pitch and the sense of storytelling
that would help him to become one of the most beloved and admired
pianists of his generation.
By the time he was a teenager, he'd learned everything he could
from the few piano teachers in the region, and his mother began
accompanying him on long weekly bus trips to Toronto so that
he could continue his studies at the Royal Conservatory of Music.
"It couldn't have been easy on her," remarked Mr.
ARPIN's wife,
Mary Jane ESPLEN. "
John's mother had a sensitive stomach and
apparently, she would be sick all the way down and all the way
back. But she was devoted and believed in her son's talent."
Indeed, when her son expressed an interest in becoming a doctor
and even insisted on studying medicine for a short time, his
mother was dead set against it. "You're too emotional to do that,"
she told him repeatedly. "You're too sensitive."
In a way, she was right, for Mr.
ARPIN was not the kind of man
to keep things bottled up inside. He was the opposite of stoic,
and had a tendency to cry at the drop of a hat. "He didn't have
to maintain a strong outer front," continued Dr.
ESPLEN, a clinician
and scientist at the University of Toronto. "He loved a lot of
things that most men wouldn't be caught dead doing, things such
as picking out flowers, shopping for groceries and even for clothes
for me. And he listened. Oh, how he listened.
"You know, he would have made a wonderful psychiatrist."
Conservatory Graduation
At 16, Mr.
ARPIN graduated from the conservatory, continuing
his studies at University of Toronto before embarking on a career
during which the American jazz great Eubie Blake called him "the
Chopin of Ragtime." After his stint with Mr.
CABLE's band, he
began in the 1960s to perform with his trio and as a soloist
in Toronto bars and hotel lounges; bespectacled and with a Prince
Valiant haircut, he entertained patrons with a repertoire that
- besides ragtime - featured classics, stride piano, bebop, traditional
jazz and film and stage tunes.
In the late 1960s, he joined CTV as the network's music director,
and in 1976, he became the first Canadian to make a "direct-to-disc"
recording, then a new kind of album where the entire side was
cut in one take. RCA producer Jack Feeney explained at the
time that such recordings required musicians who performed perfectly,
and that Mr.
ARPIN was the perfect choice - "a definitive pianist,
one who plays crisply and with very few mistakes."
Throughout the 1970s, his composition Jogging Along was the theme
song for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio program
Morningside, while "John Arpin Sundays" at the McMichael Gallery
in Kleinberg, Ontario, were much-anticipated weekly events over
a period of 20 years.
In 1984, he moved to TVOntario as writer, director and performer
for the station's beloved children's program Polka Dot Door.
On camera, he was a natural, interacting with the stuffed animal
characters Humpty, Dumpty, Marigold and Bear with a childlike
wonder, zest and curiosity.
He was always a fixture at concerts and summer festivals throughout
Southern Ontario, and he toured the rest of the world whenever
time allowed, building an international reputation as a consummate
professional who always put his own spin on whatever he was playing.
'Know The Lyrics'
"Know the lyrics," he was wont to say to artists he mentored.
In other words, they had to understand and tease out the story
of a piece of music through the language of cadence and melody,
whether or not there were actual lyrics to follow.
Alongside his own prolific concert and recording career, Mr.
ARPIN
served as music director and accompanist to both Canadian contralto
Maureen Forrester and to actress-singer Louise Pitre, who made
an international splash in her 2001 Broadway debut as Donna Sheridan
in Mamma Mia! At times, he also acted as music arranger for artists
such as Tommy Hunter and Roy Payne.
His recordings ranged the gamut from ragtime through to the music
of Andrew Lloyd Webber, honky-tonk, spirituals and tango. He
did three albums with Ms. Forrester, an instrumental album that
featured the music of singer-composer Gordon Lightfoot, another
of ARPIN at the Opera, The Complete Piano Works of Scott Joplin
and seven linked CDs of popular nostalgic tunes.
Throughout his career, he garnered two Juno nominations, won
the 1998 Scott Joplin Award from a Missouri foundation dedicated
to the preservation of ragtime and was awarded first prize out
of 450 entrants in the Yamaha Second International Original Concert
Series in Tokyo, this for his composition Lyric Suite for Piano,
Strings and Percussion.
Mr. ARPIN parlayed his indefatigable energy into his personal
life, too. An avid collector of sheet music and Nippon china,
he often "You'd never not know that John was in the room for
he was always working it, asking questions and entertaining,"
said Dr. ESPLEN, whom he married in 1990 in New Orleans. "It
didn't matter what walk of life you were from. He was such an
authentic presence."
The couple first met in 1986 at a piano lounge in Toronto, when
Dr. ESPLEN asked him to play several obscure Scott Joplin songs.
Their Friendship gradually turned to love and in 1990, they married
- he for the third time - at their good friend Al Rose's home
in New Orleans. As Mr. Rose, the noted jazz historian and impresario,
escorted the bride down the aisle, Mr.
ARPIN played An Affair
to Remember on the piano.
Dr. ESPLEN, whose parents owned an antique store, got her husband
interested in collecting Nippon china. He took to it so eagerly
that she sometimes regretted not encouraging him to collect stamps,
which would have been easier to store. "Let me just say that
after say the third or fourth new china cabinet I began to get
a little worried," she wrote in her blog. "Over the years, we
moved on beyond cocoa sets to tea sets and plates, and humidors,
and nut sets and juice sets and platters and celery sets… need
I say more?"
She was the family accountant, keeping track of purchases and
finances because Mr.
ARPIN wasn't terribly interested in such
things. "He was a real live-for-today kind of guy," she remarked.
He was a loving father to his three surviving children from his
first two marriages, while his deep faith got him through the
tragedy of the death of a son from sudden infant death syndrome
and his own diagnosis a number of years ago of a rare, inoperable
and slow-acting form of intestinal cancer.
For Mr. ARPIN, life itself was music, in all its terrible beauty.
And he was listening to it right up until the end, including
his own Blue Gardenia album of Latin tempo songs and one of his
all-time favourites, Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal's I'll Be Seeing
You.
John▲
Francis▲
Oscar▲
ARPIN was born on December 3, 1936, in Port
McNicoll, Ontario He died at home on November 8, 2007, after
a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 70. He leaves his brother,
Leo ARPIN, his wife, Mary Jane
ESPLEN, and his children Bob,
Jennifer and Nadine. He also leaves grandchildren Alexander,
Nicole, Kurt and Brianna.
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ARPPE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-12-15 published
BOISSONNEAU,
Alice
Irene
(EEDY)
In Guelph, Ontario, December 9, 2007. Novelist, poet, short-story
writer, social worker by training. Born in Walkerton, Ontario,
in 1918, raised in Saint Marys, Ontario, graduated in 1939 from
Victoria College, University of Toronto. Loving wife of the late
Arthur BOISSONNEAU.
Predeceased by her sister, Elizabeth Eedy
Brown FRYE (1997,) and her brother, John W.
EEDY (1996.) Alice
began her adult life as a hospital social worker in Toronto and
Vancouver, and wrote short stories in her spare time. Her work
appeared in the Canadian Forum, Alphabet magazine, Exile: A Literary
Quarterly, and she wrote for the Anthology series on Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation Radio. During her life with Arthur,
a specialist in forestry, Alice took to writing in an isolated
trailer in the northern Ontario woods, in the "clement" months.
Her publications included two novels, Eileen McCullough (1976),
shortlisted in 1977 for the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First
Novel Award, and A Sudden Brightness (1994); and a short story,
"The McCrimmons", in Stories from Ontario (Germaine Warkentin,
ed., 1974). In 1992, she published There Will Be Gardens, a poignant
memoir of life in Toronto. A Globe and Mail review at the time
described this latter book as mining both the grace, and the
"sour, sad stillness" of pre-"world-class" Toronto, in a "long,
hypnotic chant…to great literary effect". Her family remembers
her as a wonderful cook, who loved music, and encouraged Arthur's
recorder group; in her young life, Alice sang folk songs and
arias, seated at the piano with her mother. Alice leaves her
sisters-in-law, Dorothy
EEDY of Saint Marys and Marie
MILLER of
Woodbridge; her godson, Sy
BENSON of Brantford, and her friend
Kelli ARPPE of Guelph; and many nieces and nephews, and great
nieces and nephews, in communities throughout Canada; and in
Hong Kong, China, and London, England. A gathering for family
and Friends will take place at 1: 00 p.m. on January 12, 2008,
at 54 Paisley Street in Guelph. For further information, please
call Gilchrist Chapel in Guelph, at (519) 824-0031. In lieu of
flowers, kindly consider a donation to Amnesty International
Canada, or Oxfam Canada.
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